From my personal experience, Tiling WM managers are a lot of work to setup. It's not difficult to configure them, but they just come with REALLY barebones and honestly unusable defaults. There's a lot to configure, which means a lot of documentation to learn. It doesn't "just works", you have to spend several hours to find out what works for you and figure how to make it work. That said, I had never tried a tiling WM before and managed to make it work just fine. It's not hard, it's just work.
The easiest and fastest way to do this is start with someone else's configuration. I started with Zaney's dotfiles as they provided some good and USABLE defaults.
Packages that I'm using:
Hyprland - my WM of choice, mostly because it's pretty and very easy to configure
Waybar - You mentioned "like waybar", I'm not sure you have anything against it or not. I really like waybar because configuration is a basic json file and styling is a basic CSS file. It's very easy to work with, very easy to create your own customization. A few waybar "modules" that I recommend
nm_applet - A "system tray" network applet which integrates very easily and nicely to waybar. It allows you to configure your wi-fi/network without the command line.
swaync - Hyprland does not have a notification system, you need to install one. swaync is very nice and integrates perfectly into waybar
For a KRunner like tool, I use Tofi. Zaney recommended it, I don't know many alternatives. Like many of these applications, the default aesthetics are really bad. Tofi in particular has atrocious defaults. Absolutely awful. The software itself runs quite well, it's fast and can have a lot more useful applications than just running tools. Not sure why they don't have a decent theme out of the box, it's not that hard.
I have wl-clipboard installed. Not really a clipboard manager but sometimes I have troubles where some xwayland apps don't have access to my clipboard. It's weird. wl-paste | xclip -selection clipboard solves it.
For managing wallpapers I use swww. I don't look at my wallpaper all that much, so I don't have anything too fancy. I don't change them often, this tool is more than enough for me. An overkill for my use-case.
I suggest you use nerd-fonts, whatever one you like. Personally I really like the JetBrains Mono Nerd Font.