After trying out Cosmic, Gnome,KDE Plasma, and Hyprland, I feel like plasma is the most usable for me coming from Windows. It solves the gripes I had about lack of customizability while still starting me off with a familiar homebar. I will be going back and forth with gnome for a while.
I really like gnome and the sliding desktops, and all the extensions seem to make it very customizable as well, but not directly like plasma, instead you mix and match (or make) extensions to get the look you want. (correct me if im wrong, I used it for a day)
Hyprland seems very nice for multitasking but the keyboard focus of the presets ive tried doesn’t really appeal to me, I like being able to just use my mouse sometimes.
Cosmic, is definitely an alpha and im interested to see what it becomes, wont be using it now.
After many years of tiling wms I recently settled on Plasma. I found that tiling causes more issues than it solves (window rules much?!). For me tiling only is useful for terminals but there are other solutions for that (tmux for example).
I had to get used to not being able to do workspace per monitor anymore but now I am using Activities which works really well actually. I am a dev and have a 3 monitor setup, one for logging (bunch of terminals), one for coding and one for the output of the project I am working on (browser).
I also play games for which Plasma is perfect, its xwayland implementation is flawless, even on HiDPI which cannot be said of Hyprland for example.
Tl;dr I like Plasma.
But dare you something doesn’t work as expected under plasma. Trying to figure out what causes the issue is a daunting task. Also you mentioned windows rules much, did you mean you prefer windows rules from plasma to tiling? Because setting up windows rules for all your applications is AT LEAST as bothersome as it is in any of the twms I tried/use (i3wm, river) or WMs like labwc.