I used to use i3 on my personal laptop, but my use cases for my laptop have dropped substantially after the A key stopped working (and I'm not keen on writing Gedsby). At work I swapped over to a Framework laptop with Gnome and Ubuntu, and I'm not entirely happy about that, but I simply don't have the time to rice around anymore. Still, your i3-plasma hybrid sounds enticing. Regolith supposedly exists for my setup, but it's not updated for 22.04 yet, sadly.
but I simply don't have the time to rice around anymore
Same here, but I definitely still enjoy seeing other people's rices!