Stage manager looks like another wasted opportunity. All that wasted space...
Compared to command + tab or exposé, this approach is more visual and direct, which seems to be a better fit for a form factor that offers much more screen real estate.
I guess this is the cost Apple is willing to pay to ease mac and ipad users into reality OS.
Even though Spaces is an awesome idea, I find it very inconvenient to use even with 4-finger swiping. Perhaps it's the lack of visual cues that is the issue for me. And I find that most of the left/right real-estate on my screen wasted anyways, so this might be something I can actually use.
I already rely on Spaces for day-to-day organization (one per task) but each individual Space can become really hectic when you have several things to reference simultaneously (e.g. wikis, specs, Figma, Zeplin, screenshots, etc...). This cleaned everything up nicely without having to drag windows off the edges of the screen or risk minimizing / hiding and having them show up elsewhere.
It really needs a way to magnify the little previews though, either by hovering to peek them or just magnification the way it works in the Dock.
I would pay for fancyzones on macOS