There must be someone out there in the wide world who configures their tiling WM to default to floating windows.
In my case swaywm (and previously i3wm).
I have 3 persistent programs that tile and the rest float - when I had swaywm set to 'tile', it became such a burden to write 'for_window' clauses for every new transitory program.
If I want it to tile, it's easy enough to $mod-Space it.
On my daily driver, firefox & mythtv have their own workspaces. On another workspace, emacs gets a half-screen and 2 terminals get a quarter screen. I set them up at session start and that's 95% of what I need. After that, everything gets a floating screen - which is what many of the apps expect and need.
I also have some scripts that automatically summon floaters from the scatchpad and fit them on the screen (without changing their size, so not tiling).
It's all here, if anyone is interested: https://gitlab.com/wef/dotfiles