As for the swiping motion and "human vision can only see a little bit at a time", you're right, but I can see motion and changes in things pretty well on the edges.
Further, I find the animation experience of my whole world changing in front of me when I go to a different workspace to be incredibly distracting - enough that I might forget what I'm doing. Turning my head to the right (I tend to work on my left monitor) is a much less mentally confusing experience.
To add to that, right now, I have Hacker News open to the left-most, taking up half the screen, Slack in the center, and then the documentation for a new feature taking up the whole right screen. That means that my docs are a slight turn of the head away, and no distracting animations. When I close this window after completing this message, I'll easily be able to replace Slack and Firefox with my IDE (which will be split down the middle with two documents open concurrently), and I'll be able to go right to work, and my spec sheet will still be to the right of my vision and ready to be developed against.
If the coding gets really, really complicated, I'll be able to easily have 3 windows open, side by side by side, at the width of the window I like (around 120 columns), all in a comfortable range.
I am perfectly capable, also, of picking up my laptop and going off to the couch - I did it last night for a change in scenery - and working from there; but, I prefer the real-estate that a 1440p and a 1080p (of different sizes) next to each other provides me.
What kind of animation does your OS use? For me, on Gnome, the transition is instantaneous (no animation). Switching between workspaces is snappy.
Also, if you change tabs in your browser, then you also have "the whole world changing in front of you". I'm curious what exactly makes a virtual desktop not pleasant to use for you.
There's also to do with the frequency of the action. I don't open new tabs very much; and, when I do, I tend to already be distracted and doing something off-hand, like looking at Reddit. Deep in work, it's far more distracting and would be far, far more regular.
As for relevant operating system:
* OS X
* Linux (Mint, generally)
And as a bonus, you're helping to save the planet as you're not burning energy for monitors you're not looking at.
Another bonus is that you don't feel under-equipped anytime you move to a different computer (or a laptop).
By the way, I'm curious: how do you quickly know which screen has keyboard focus without manually scanning all your screens? And how do you quickly switch between windows?