I used to think this way, but having used popOs's tiling in gnome I gotta say it's the best of all worlds. I really like being able to have code split with documentation or an ebook. I know you can technically use the manual split L/R but having it autosplit is nice. I feel like it really supercharges my research workflow.

If I don't want something to split, I can either turn off tiling and revert back to default gnome behavior (rare), add an exclusion for something I never want tiled, or most often I just send that app to a new virtual desktop.