I used PaperWM for some years in the past, it was great. But then came compatibility issues and I couldn’t just live with plain Gnome. I forked catwm and used this as a classic tiling wm. Then wayland came and I wanted smooth animations. By then the PaperWM situation did not improve and I settled on default Gnome.
I followed with interest what Niri was doing. I tried it some months ago and realized that my waybar and niri config needs a lot of improvement to be good enough for me. I went straight back to Gnome, because I did not want to invest the time.
I am currently sort of happy with the useless gap extension for Gnome. I am not sure whether I should give PaperWM another go and whether it is available for Gnome 48. What I like about Gnome is the complete ecosystem and how GDM is part of it. I would loose some of its functionality when I do invest the time to configure niri and all the little tools that mimic gnome-shell.
I recently installed trixie on the desktop and will probably stay there and not move to the next testing. I hope it won’t feel that outdated after 2 years or so.
I was on Gentoo before, the packaged Gnome version there is actually lower than on trixie currently.