I've used tmux within a tiling wm for years. I never really understood this view that you don't need both, but it is common. I don't want a bunch of separate terminal windows. I lay out my tiles around having one main one, and then from there I split into tmux panes and windows. It feels neat and dense this way. I have a keybind to jump to my named terminal with tmux. It's easy to open a new tmux window with a few keypresses. It's easy to work with the scrollback. The layout stays consistent.

I feel naked without tmux. I naturally want to do various tmux actions. It's maybe like pinned vs unpinned browser tabs. If I have a terminal without tmux running, it feels like I'll close it soon, so I don't get attached, and it bugs me a bit the longer it's open.

I still use split windows inside vim and emacs as well. Some say it's silly or redundant, but they all work a bit differently and have their own functions. Emacs can scroll the "other window", vim has an extra clipboard.

You can write scripts to automatically open up tmux windows to certain directories/files/software arranged and named however you like. it can be handy to open an entire development workspace for a project with a single command. I'm not sure if other tools like i3 can do this.

I like having the familiar emacs keybindings to navigate the terminal, e.g. to be able to scroll quickly, search, and copy/paste without needing to take my hands off the keyboard.

I'm sure there's some terminal emulator that supports that...any recommendations/suggestions/configs?

I think so, and my evidence for that is I've been using tmux a lot less as I've done more of my development work locally.

BUT - it still has plenty of utility when working on remote machines. So, I still use it every day. I'm just not constantly working in it.

Or even terminal clients with split panes such as iterm. You can even configure it to autoconnect to remote servers on a per profile basis.

Memory usage? 20 terminal emulators will consume half GB of memory.