Another river user here. I like river, but I wouldn't recommend it (for someone who's never used a tiler). It feels a bit bare bones and there's not that much development going on (still active, but not frequent updates).
Both Sway and Hyprland are probably good picks. You can always switch to a different one, if your first choice doesn't satisfy you.
While you make many valid points, I think it's not reasonable to assume that OP could have avoided all the struggles they had, if they just had informed himself prior to installing. Especially since many of them problems described were probably caused by an unfortunate combination of software/driver issues, a specific hardware setup and certain user expectations.
I doubt that watching tech YouTubers or similar would have helped much.