When I moved to Hyprland after having tried almost every DE and tiling WM, I had to write my own layout plugin (hyprscroller) because of how much I missed PaperWM.
If you moved from classic DEs with floating windows and lots of mouse to a tiling WM, scrolling adds another advantage. You can even ignore it and use it as a classic tiling WM, but you also have all the advantages of scrolling once you find a use for them.
You can still use a Scrolling WM to tile everything the way you would on a Tiling WM and that is where it shines. It's a fantastic solution to the screen estate problem, which tiling managers struggle with.
You're right that they are a bit different but I personally don't see the need for tiling when Scrolling WMs provide the same functionality (vertical and horizontal tiling + workspaces) as well :D
The point behind tiling WMs and why a lot of people use lightweight IDEs (meaning multi-window IDEs) is that the idea of virtual desktops is used as a state management and state chronic restoration tool.
A lot of i3/sway users I've seen (including me) are using virtual desktops to not forget what they were working on before the current task. Each dependency that created a sub task in their workflow is represented by a "new layer set of windows". If they have multiple monitors, each monitor has a dedicated place for tools. E.g. the browser window for research, the debugging output, the app window they're working on etc.
Why I think scrolling WMs don't integrate nicely with this is because they lose the state of the historic placement of windows, which is kinda bad for this kind of workflow. But it might be just my bubble of devs that I interacted with.
Would be nice to hear how you were using tiling WMs before that? Was your workflow similar at all to what I described?