I have used Sway for a few months now previously using Xfce. I was curious in trying a tiling window manager but thought it would be to much effort to configure, but found sway was fairly easy to understand(once you figure out how to open the terminal), the default config explains most things you will need.
For the bar I use waybar, it’s easy to use and customize. For my laptop I use yambar which is more lightweight and harder to config. I found it bit more confusing and took more effort to figure out, but I usually keep the contents of my bar simple so didn’t have much of a problem achieving the results I wanted. I like both but waybar is more friendly and easy to use, where as yambar is more simple in features and lightweight.
For a launcher I’ve only used fuzzel but might try others sometime like Ulaucher which seems similar to fuzzel. Some menus like bemenu look good if I want something that looks more simple.
Notification manager I’ve only used swaync as I rarely see notifications and it works without issue for the rare notification that does show up. However I still might try something like dunst, mako or fnott.
Screenshots i use grim, slurp to select the area to screenshot and swappy to edit by drawing, adding text after. Just made a shortcut to exec this in my sway config:grim -g "$(slurp)" - | swappy -f -
It has work as a good replacement to flameshot for me as flameshot had issue on wayland last time I tried.
I first used kitty when I could, as my terminal but recently started using foot the default terminal that can come with sway. I never used any features that might make kitty more appealing and found foot more simple and all I needed for now. Also starts slightly faster, which is kinda neat. I like things that are light and simple if it doesn’t get in the way.