Not cumbersome at all if you adhere to the core principles and think through how you actually use your computer.
Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to run every application in its own (VM).
You can run any number of apps in a single VM, so the principle is that you define what applications (use cases) can and should be isolated from each other and use multiple VMs to implement that segmentation between (groups of) apps.
For example, you can have one VM for all your work apps and another for the remaining use cases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubes_OS