Coming from the same background as the author and about checks notes 15 years older (ouch), I loved Niri very much. However I never managed to make x11 windows behave correctly. At the moment the solutions are a bit cumbersome [0] and I didn't manage to have a smooth experience so far...
I don't have a lot of practice with it, but what problems did you have with xwayland-satellite? It really seems like you just run it and everything magically works
[0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland