> But then I found "Regolith". There are a few distributions which have i3 out of the box, but this one had a special keybinding reminder that was one click (or keybinding) away. I was very surprised by how quickly I adapted once the barrier of entry was removed.

The i3 community variant of Manjaro is also a nice config for new i3 users (I'm one of them) on an Arch derivative.