nano-sidebar VS burly.el

You can use treemacs or maybe something like nano-sidebar. Ultimately if you want to look at someone who is working to make emacs look more modern, check out the author of nano-sidebar and their other packages.

Code is available at https://github.com/rougier/nano-sidebar. I only tested it on OSX and I don't know if it works on other systems.

burly.el by u/alphapapa - might be an easier way to approach the current-window-configuration/set-window-configuration that Sacha has implemented

For the "lauch workspaces", I use burly which just uses simple bookmarks. Then with consult, I just use C-x b, then m to narrow to bookmarks and I have all the workspaces available (remote as well).

Well, that is essentially what Burly does: https://github.com/alphapapa/burly.el

Install https://github.com/alphapapa/burly.el

These features are especially useful with Burly: https://github.com/alphapapa/burly.el Because Burly can save and restore those kinds of windows, so you need not recreate them manually.

How does it compare to packages like burly, which (to my understanding) provide similar features?

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but take a look at this: https://github.com/alphapapa/burly.el

I think you want "window configurations", which can be saved into registers. You might try tab-bar-mode for cycling through them. Or there's also https://github.com/alphapapa/burly.el/ . (I'd like something similar but haven't found something that matches what I want)

desktop is not a great solution for restoring buffers, because it generally only works for file-backed buffers. Instead, I wrote Burly to restore buffers, windows, and frames in mode-specific ways, on-demand using Emacs bookmarks. This is much more flexible and powerful than similar functionality in desktop.