If you haven't tried niri yet, it's pretty great. If you are interested in a tiling WM and don't want to mess with the omarchy/hyprland fascists, I recommend checking it out. The tiling behavior makes sense and there aren't several dozen shortcuts to learn before you can use it properly.
And if you want to play around with a distro where it's set up my default, check out zirconium. One of the reasons that kept me away from trying a tiling window manager was because I didn't want to mess with a bunch of config files before my laptop became not-annoying to use, and this has a decent set up from the start.
It's a universal blue (fedora atomic) derivative built on niri and dankmaterialshell, and it's great for older hardware. I installed on a 10 year old laptop, and it feels brand new. From what I can tell Niri+DMS uses about half the resources as a gnome or kde desktop. It's extremely smooth, stable, and has very sensible and minimal default software installed. It's focus is developers, but you can still game on it. It just won't have all the bells and whistles of something like bazzite preinstalled.
Niri is also easy to set up with CachyOS from what I understand.
I rate it 9 out of 10 linuxes. 
It would probably work pretty well in a VM, that would probably be a good way to try it out. Zirconium has some quality of life improvements built in, like if you pop out the video browser in firefox it will automatically be a floating always on top window. There's a bunch of little things like that, and for the most part everything is really intuitive. I think most people will be pleasantly surprised at how functional it is.
I'll take a look into it with a VM then. I also decided to look around into what is used for tiling on KDE right now, last time I tried it the big one was Bismuth which had a cool ass logo, but seems like nowadays the 2 options are Polonium and Krohnkite. There's also one that takes inspiration from Niri stuff, called PlasmaZones, but it is not auto tiling.
Last time I was on kde and wanted to try scrolling, I used carousel, might be worth a try if it's still active.
I've seen that one mentioned, but I didn't go looking for it yet. I think PlasmaZones has scrolling too if I'm not mistaken.