You sound like somebody who's sampled a grand total of 1 tiling wm and now thinks they know the field. You do not.

By your reasoning, i3 is a copycat of ION or wmii and shouldn't have even bothered.

There is plenty of room in the market for more tiling wm's. Yes, you can technically run i3 in conjunction with Gnome but then you are essentially losing all the QoL and floating features of Mutter including the expose view which I use heavily.