Tried it briefly, I currently use i3 on ubuntu and found it to be much much slower than that, the animations while pretty get pretty jarring once u start switching windows too often. I much prefer the i3 style of just showing a blinking cursor on switching windows.

The grid layout is interesting but I found it strange that the all tabs are shown along the left side in split mode. It would be interesting to see how the grid differs from the tree layout that i3 uses.

I did like their default hot keys and the side bar for switching work spaces. Ultimately though if you don't like gnome this isn't going to change that. But if you do prefer i3 and want a more nicer environment with all the gnome system management ui's consider using https://regolith-linux.org/