I've used dwm for years and recently switched to niri and really, really like it.

I'm with you, that tiling vertically is not useful. Niri aligns better with my innate mental model: just keep adding new panes to the right offscreen that I can scroll through, then I can swipe up and down for more lanes to do collections of different tasks.

I feel much more productive doing read/write tasks, like viewing tickets + code or PDFs + tickets and so-on