I have been using i3 for years now. Rock solid, extremely lightweight and very simple to use. Once configured I never found myself looking back at it. Documentation is superb, and didn't take me more than a week to get used to it. Never tried PaperWM, nor other WM as nothing has been simpler nor more effective than i3. Probably dwm but I think is for those that like to have some hands on and tweaking.
Of course nothing will ever be simpler than i3 if you never try anything else. I am happy with sway and have resisted the urge to try hyprland/paperwm. But I'm not going to delude myself and say it's because sway is better. It's just that I don't want to endure the switching costs.
My comment was a little bit short. I have used plenty of window manages in the past: window maker, blackbox (now dead I guess?), gnome (from the era of RedHat 6.2 onwards), KDE, Ubuntu desktops (I don't know if is Gnome tweaked or something else). Perhaps I stay loyal to i3 because it was the first tiling manager that I tried and seemed pretty straightforward to be productive with it. Have to try other ones as well but never find time to do so. Same story happened to me with Vim. I still need to give Emacs a shot.