I've been using awesomewm for a few years now, and while it's not i3 I believe it's close enough that I can answer that: A tiling wm is very viable for a general purpose desktop. It's also extra useful if you have a multi-monitor setup.

Applications that works in fullscreen (mpv, vlc, video games) requires you to set them fullscreen/floating, either yourself with a keybinding (Mod+f on awesome) or through the wm's config file. Some applications do not like tiling at all, some java gui apps from what I remember, but there are so few of them that I can't actually give you any example.

I say give it a shot, but beware: controlling your desktop entirely from your keyboard is addictive.