FWIW, I much prefer learning and using 4-5 "hackish utilities" to the giant blob of design-by-committee that is Gnome or KDE. Redshift took like 1 minute to set up once, and has worked flawlessly w/o intervention since. Taskbar is actually better than on any distribution including Mac or Windows, IMO. I can put anything on the system in my task bar with a few minutes of work. Try that anywhere else. Screen recording is still a bit buggy, but usually because projects (like Electron) haven't updated their dependencies.

Love Sway.

I'd kind of say it the other way around. I don't notice any real downside over X, configuration is much nicer, and apparently it's more secure or something? Why not.