If you want to break out of the windows mold, tiling windows managers are where its at. You’ve already explored that route with i3, and there are other alternatives, but they all have a bit of a learning curve unfortunately. hyprland might be worth a try. I’ve only dabbled but I did remember it being a bit more beginner friendly than i3. But be prepared to be confused, read a bunch of forum posts and edit config files for a bit.

You have the option of piping it into a file instead, inspecting that file for yourself and then running it, or running it in some sandboxed environment. Ultimately though, if you are downloading software over the internet you have to place a certain amount of trust in the person your downloading the software from. Even if you’re absolutely sure that the download script doesn’t wipe your home directory, you’re going to have to run the program at some point and it could just as easily wipe your home directory at that point instead.