Yeah, it can be quite frustrating dealing with a new setup in the beginning. I think the most important thing in the beginning is to know how to get unstuck fast. I think i3 has a hotkey to open up the help where you can look up common actions. You could also print it out. But yes, you need to bring some time in the first few days but the idea is it will be worth it in the long run just like with vim:

Yeah, vim is awesome :) There is still so much I could learn about it but figuring out how to use vim macros was already a game changer for me. I want to switch from VSCode to neovim one day but I am not there yet.