I felt the same way but I love it these days, I just used it wrong for a long time. It's very opinionated and you kind of have to adjust to the workflow. It makes more sense to treat it more like a tiling window manager than a traditional UI and use the keyboard extensively.

I've reconfigured switching between workspaces to simpler hotkeys and together with the overview you can keep a lot of stuff open and navigate without things feeling cluttered.