I'm a hyprland zoomer but I used Niri for a bit and it worked pretty well. It slots in perfectly for someone coming from an average single-monitor Windows workflow (for most office-style tasks). I still think that more complex tiling setups have a higher productivity ceiling though. I guess if you're like this guy and keep >10 workspaces open at once you'd have to go with Niri. I wonder if the increased battery life would still hold for someone that only keeps a few windows open at once. 2 hours is insane from just a change of wm
I'm still cycling through wayland and x11, and I also do get 1.5 hours more runtime on average on my old 2nd gen t14s with x11+xmonad+no compositor. It's one of the main reasons I'm struggling to move permanently, as I really don't see any advantage from my perspective as I don't use any desktop environment or feature that would make a compositor actually useful. The only thing I do notice occasionally are black borders due to shadow dropdowns in gtk4 programs that don't respect the system theme I've set.