Launching a terminal in sway is so easy ($mod+enter) that I haven't bothered to replicate the same thing in Emacs. As for the gui things, it's mostly for moving stuff between smb shares (I was tagging music files). Dired is great, but sometimes, I idled in mouse mode.
Why not EXWM to have free tiling instead of using i3 like a set of FF tabs... That's was my path years ago, I've tried a bit i3 concluding it's rigid tiling model it's essentially useless and I've in the end use tabs/split screen and rarely stacks. Then EXWM, at first very hard to start as a WM (I was also new to Emacs, former hardcore vimmer) but thereafter... I can't even use floating WMs nowadays... Though I do not user eat/vterm/eshell simply because for casual terminal usage (living in Emacs makes me use the terminal much, much less) it's not that comfy.
Dired on contrary is super good also to rename files en masse, to filter them and so on.
Since you use Emacs, why not use Eat or vterm?
https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat
https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm
> 4. File Manager (gui)
Why not use Dired?
(More than 90% of the time, I only run Emacs, Firefox and nothing else, which is why tiling is useless for me.)