the plausible deniability is getting thinner and thinner - this time it was that the whole video was jungle themed, so obviously it had nothing to do with racism!

Sloppy reading on my part as well. Seems like you want something between the standard windows/macos experience and i3, and that sounds like a good idea, but I'm not sure it exists

Fedora has an i3 flavor, you could try that - or just install whatever WM you want to check out on your current setup. You can usually select your WM on the login screen once it's installed.