Tried that, but then I can't have an important part of a SO answer visible while I work in my editor to play around with stuff, while watching the terminal churn away some stuff in a partially obscured window such that I can see when it finishes.

You can float windows in i3 if you wanted to do this. I also have a hotkey to make my window 80% transparent so I can reference docs while keeping my editor fullscreen.

But yeah, if that's your big use case, seems like you just prefer non-tiling workflows.