I’m not a big fan of i3 either, pop shell and gnome are the best combination i’ve tried because i get the niceties of i3-style tiling but with good mouse-based defaults and I don’t have to waste time configuring things that everyone needs on a daily basis
afaik KDE still doesn’t have any tolerable way to tile windows on wayland
if i need to open a menu to set up zones you are doing it wrong. if i have to pick from premade layouts you are doing it wrong. pop shell on gnome would be perfect if it wasn’t married to gnome and slowly rotting over time: i can pick up a window, drag it to where i want to put it in the binary tiling tree, and it goes there.
i’ve tried bismuth and krohnkite, they’re still the “grab bag of canned layouts” type of tiling extension, pop shell lets me build a binary tree with arbitrary splits and tabs like I could do in sway or hyprland and as far as I know the clunky built-in snap zone menu is the closest thing that’s available for plasma