I used to always bounce back and forth between Gnome, Plasma, Sway and Hyprland.
I love tiling compositors, but I also love having a fully functional desktop without stitching together two dozen different tools and configuring each separately. I got better things to do than edit text files for days.
And I think I found my holy grail: niri with Dank Material Shell.
DMS really is something else. A fully-fledged DE that sits on top of a tiling wayland compositor, with a workflow similar to Gnome and GUI customization options similar to Plasma.
I realize I’m shilling hard here, but I don’t even know the guy who made it. I’m just genuinely floored by the project’s quality.
I followed the same path as OP and your friend in the last week. I settled with Niri and Noctalia and am very happy.