I'm using herbstluftwm and am happiest with it, but spent years on i3, almost a year in bspwm, and a hot minute on sway. All after years of mostly KDE, some Gnome, and a few years (concurrently w/ Linux) on Macs from work.
Any tiling WM over any DE. I'd go back to i3 before choosing either Gnome or KDE. The one exception would be a fully feature-complete NeXTSTEP clone. I'd switch to that in a heartbeat. Not OpenSTEP, not Windowmaker; NS was beautiful, functional, fully integrated in all aspects - like MacOS, but without the dumbed-down idiocracy.