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chunkwm at least had a pretty long configuration and needed a separate hotkey daemon koekeishiya/skhd, some plugins needed to disable SIP protection due to apple policy etc etc. Each OS update got new problems (always apple policy).
Can't recommend https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/ and https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd enough. Coming from DWM, yabai has actually worked quite well for me.
However, I really found that the best thing to do was simply to use Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) rather than trying to make Mac be a proper X-based environment.
There is a really slick project I've been using that makes it nicer to use macOS due to using recent versions of all the *nix utils. It's called Linuxify.
If you are building packages from source or developing software yourself, you'll want Xcode, which is Apple's IDE. It includes the Clang compiler, git, and all sorts of other stuff. Apple stopped using GCC years ago, but Clang is essentially GCC-compatible in the vast majority of cases. (It's nice that there's competition in the open source compiler world. It makes all the compilers better!) There are built-in stub executables for various developer tools in $PATH that will trampoline to copies of the real tools embedded in Xcode, so don't be surprised when you check the presence of /usr/bin/clang and discover it exists even though you haven't installed Xcode. This mechanism lets Apple update these tools out of band with the OS itself.
People have already discussed Homebrew so I won't elaborate here other than to say it's a decent package manager. Just be aware that it only manages a set of overlays for the core system, not the whole thing (since the core bits of macOS are tested and updated in lockstep with each other by Apple). Once you've installed Homebrew, installing a new shell is just as easy as on any Linux distro: install the shell from the package manager, add it to /etc/shells, and chsh(1). I'm a happy fish user myself.
There is a workaround for getting the extra buttons an a real mouse working, here