When animation became more ubiquitous (in app) it got toned down a lot and when those sorts of animations are turned off you notice the speed increase and that your brain can do the visual diff just fine.

There are still plenty of visual bling you can add to i3wm without sacrificing the "instantaneous" of it though.

Nowadays I just use the default configuration of whatever OS I am on, just with some minimal configuration changes like icon size or mouse double click behavior.