Tiling widow managers are popular, but they’re definitely a taste.
Oh, I refered to that in your post. To me all WMs/compositors are a matter of taste, including stacking ones (on wayland from the stacking ones I only like labwc though it's xml config is not what I would prefer). And you already clarified, but it gave me the impression that it was implicit that tiling was a matter of taste, when those WMs/compositors also offer tabbed/stacked mode, which to me it's not tiling at all, and offers something really appealing not so easily to achieve on any stacking WM/compositor.
Regarding config, well yes, if one is looking for no config at all, and still get the WM/compositor to be useful and also to one's liking, then that's hard to find. But the config files once achieving what one likes and is productive with, then one barely looks at it again, and they are usually portable (usually not only across PCs, also across distros).
But I got your point, sort of "plug and play" as they said before, just install it and without any config be productive with it... I can't imagine that. I heard river is pretty close to dwm, but I can't tell much about it. The river idea of dynamic tiling, which seems to be the default doesn't really appeal to me, so I would need to do tabbed mode any ways, which doesn't seem to be the default, so at least for me it wouldn't be that configless... But maybe it would be to dynamic tiling people.
Of course using another distro you want to emulate is much better.
But as it's debian based, I'm wondering if a better approach would be to use repos from another close enough distro, like derivative distros which decide to build the stuff for the distro as much as possible (that maybe won't prevent the need of flatpak and the like).
Another approach would be using a package manager that can work on top of any distro, like Guix, at least for FLOSS software.
I use artix, so if something is not in the official artix repos pacman also look on arch repos, then it looks my personal repos (I build some personal packages, but I also use aurutils, so there are packages on one of my personal repos that are really aur packages not mine). As I prefer to package the stuff I can't find anywhere I haven't found the need for something like Guix, but it might come handful if in order to include some software which depends on software way old for artix or something similar to that. Just a reminder that Guix and the like will work fine as package mechanism on top of any distro given their approach to keep the software out of the common unix path hierarchy.