I disagree on the point of screen size. On small screens I want every last pixel to count, and tiling and tabs work well for that. On large screens, I find tiling to be a more efficient option than dragging windows around.
That said, available input devices absolutely do make a difference, and that does correlate with screen size.
Also, mobile OSes won't really ever have more than 2-3 windows shown at the same time, since the screens are so small. That will probably change once we have folding devices or AR/VR. But super limited "tiling" window managers do make sense with such limited UIs.
Do you have proof of this? I suspect they failed because everyone decided to copy the Mac which was trying to emulate a real desktop with bits of paper on it.
> Super limited "tiling" window managers do make sense with such limited UIs.
They also often make sense for complicated UIs, e.g. IDEs such as Visual Studio and browsers such as Firefox, which have docked sidebars and tabs in preference to overlapping windows.
> The first version (Windows 1.0) featured a tiling window manager, partly because of litigation by Apple claiming ownership of the overlapping window desktop metaphor. But due to complaints, the next version (Windows 2.0) followed the desktop metaphor. All later versions of the operating system stuck to this approach as the default behaviour.
They have different design goals. A tiling window manager is not a good default for everyone or every device type or screen size.