Yes and no; the difference with workspace is that I was limited to 0-9 with my old wm, so at some point I'd just run out of space and had to close some windows. (well, that, and X11 is apparently limited to 256 clients by default and I never changed that; but I rarely hit that limit :P)

I do have some struts on the side, but I'm basically always juggling with at least 4 or 5 tasks so I always have things open; (I'm not using any right now but I do like the "quake terminals" temporary term styles... But for the same reason it's not always appropriate -- if I didn't close the term, it's because I wasn't done with it and mean to get back to it...)

I started using niri before the overview, I think that could help if I get used to it. But better than overview, what I'd want is something always visible like some horizontal scrollbar indicator to remind me there's e.g. more than 3 windows hidden or something. That might be possible to do with waybar and a bit of glue parsing the windows list...