As an early adopter to monitor technology, I have to say that I consistently regret it.
I got one of the first 4k mainstream monitors. I paid $3000 for it. This was back in the day when DisplayPort didn't really "do" 4k, so it was done by pretending it was two monitors internally. This broke EVERYTHING. For years, I struggled with Linux trying to treat two monitors as one big one (and putting new windows right on the border). Welp, they fixed that. But trying to treat two monitors as though it's one was completely impossible. I eventually got it to work by enabling a bunch of random features in the nVidia driver, that when enabled together triggered a bug that broke Xrandr, so everything thought I just had one monitor. (I could not, of course, add a second monitor.) Miraculously, they never fixed that bug. It worked for half a decade at least. (At some point in there I switched to Windows, which of course supported it perfectly because the driver was specifically hacked to detect that model number and do extra stuff.)
Several years later, I wanted to get a monitor that supported more colors than sRGB. Big mistake! While inexpensive, I learned that NOTHING supports color spaces correctly. The Adobe apps do, but that's about it. Online image sharing services go out of their way to MODIFY the color space that you tag an image with, so there is no hope of anything ever showing the right colors unless you manually clip them to sRGB. Things like the Win32 API, CSS, etc. have no way to say what color space a color is encoded in, so there is no way to make the operating system display the right color. ("background-color: #abcdef" just means "set the color on the user's display to #abcdef", which is a completely meaningless thing to do unless your working colorspace is sRGB, and the user's monitor works in sRGB. It worked for years, but was never correct.) The worst thing is, nobody appears to care. ("It just makes colors more vibrant!" they'll tell you) Big mistake. Do not buy unless you never want to see a color as the author intended ever again. (I solved my photography colorspace problem by switching to black and white film. Take that, colors! You can't display them incorrectly if there aren't any!)
The next thing I jumped on is high refresh rate. I waited until 144Hz IPS panels were affordable, and got one. It sure is better than 60Hz, which looks like a slideshow, but there are of course problems. The first is... it is pretty optimistic to think that an IPS panel will actually update at 144Hz. They do not. The result is blur. I run mine at 120Hz with ULMB (which basically strobes the backlight at the display update rate). That looks really good. There are some artifacts caused by the IPS display, and 120Hz is noticeably slow, but moving things sure are clear. You can pan a google map and read the labels as it moves. Try that right now on your 60Hz display, you can't do it!
But because of IPS, at 144Hz without ULMB, you get a smooth mush. At 120Hz with ULMB, you can read moving content (like player names attached to people in an FPS, it is trippy the first time you use it). Having said that, it's bad for anything that doesn't render at 120Hz. Web browsers, games, CAD... great! Videos... AWFUL, just awful. On a 30/24Hz video, frames get strobed 4 or 5 times, and this causes your brain to think "hey, a slide show". (You can record the display with a high speed camera, and it will look completely different from what you see in real life. Darn brain, always messing things up.) Things like pans skip and jerk, as your brain tries to interpret the video stream as a series of <image 1> <black screen> <image 1> <black screen> <image 2> <black screen> ... instead of a smooth blend of <image 1> <image 2> ... You can post-process the video to "invent" frames in the middle, so your monitor displays new image data each time it strobes the backlight. I do this with mpv and it looks great. But if you watch video in a browser, you are out of luck.
My TL;DR here is that buying any sort of fancy monitor is just going to make you very unhappy. You will learn everything in the world there is to know about color space math, pixel transition times, using high speed cameras to debug issues (what a time sink), how your brain processes moving images, etc. It won't make you any happier. It won't make you better at programming.
If you play competitive games, get a TN 1080p 240Hz monitor, simply because that's what everyone else uses. Don't use it for anything except the game, because every second that you use it it will make you unhappy. But it's absolutely a joy to play a game on it. (Why 1080p and not 1440p? Guess who bought a 1440p 165Hz monitor. Not anyone that has ever contributed code to the game or played the game at a professional level. But I did! Guess who gets to live with the bugs.)
If you are a programmer, just buy whatever. Every single monitor ever designed will make you unhappy.
If you are a programmer who works with color, get yourself a good therapist. You will be meeting with them on a daily basis, and even then, you'll still be scarred for life. It's all about damage control at this point.
I got one of the first 4k mainstream monitors. I paid $3000 for it. This was back in the day when DisplayPort didn't really "do" 4k, so it was done by pretending it was two monitors internally. This broke EVERYTHING. For years, I struggled with Linux trying to treat two monitors as one big one (and putting new windows right on the border). Welp, they fixed that. But trying to treat two monitors as though it's one was completely impossible. I eventually got it to work by enabling a bunch of random features in the nVidia driver, that when enabled together triggered a bug that broke Xrandr, so everything thought I just had one monitor. (I could not, of course, add a second monitor.) Miraculously, they never fixed that bug. It worked for half a decade at least. (At some point in there I switched to Windows, which of course supported it perfectly because the driver was specifically hacked to detect that model number and do extra stuff.)
Several years later, I wanted to get a monitor that supported more colors than sRGB. Big mistake! While inexpensive, I learned that NOTHING supports color spaces correctly. The Adobe apps do, but that's about it. Online image sharing services go out of their way to MODIFY the color space that you tag an image with, so there is no hope of anything ever showing the right colors unless you manually clip them to sRGB. Things like the Win32 API, CSS, etc. have no way to say what color space a color is encoded in, so there is no way to make the operating system display the right color. ("background-color: #abcdef" just means "set the color on the user's display to #abcdef", which is a completely meaningless thing to do unless your working colorspace is sRGB, and the user's monitor works in sRGB. It worked for years, but was never correct.) The worst thing is, nobody appears to care. ("It just makes colors more vibrant!" they'll tell you) Big mistake. Do not buy unless you never want to see a color as the author intended ever again. (I solved my photography colorspace problem by switching to black and white film. Take that, colors! You can't display them incorrectly if there aren't any!)
The next thing I jumped on is high refresh rate. I waited until 144Hz IPS panels were affordable, and got one. It sure is better than 60Hz, which looks like a slideshow, but there are of course problems. The first is... it is pretty optimistic to think that an IPS panel will actually update at 144Hz. They do not. The result is blur. I run mine at 120Hz with ULMB (which basically strobes the backlight at the display update rate). That looks really good. There are some artifacts caused by the IPS display, and 120Hz is noticeably slow, but moving things sure are clear. You can pan a google map and read the labels as it moves. Try that right now on your 60Hz display, you can't do it!
But because of IPS, at 144Hz without ULMB, you get a smooth mush. At 120Hz with ULMB, you can read moving content (like player names attached to people in an FPS, it is trippy the first time you use it). Having said that, it's bad for anything that doesn't render at 120Hz. Web browsers, games, CAD... great! Videos... AWFUL, just awful. On a 30/24Hz video, frames get strobed 4 or 5 times, and this causes your brain to think "hey, a slide show". (You can record the display with a high speed camera, and it will look completely different from what you see in real life. Darn brain, always messing things up.) Things like pans skip and jerk, as your brain tries to interpret the video stream as a series of <image 1> <black screen> <image 1> <black screen> <image 2> <black screen> ... instead of a smooth blend of <image 1> <image 2> ... You can post-process the video to "invent" frames in the middle, so your monitor displays new image data each time it strobes the backlight. I do this with mpv and it looks great. But if you watch video in a browser, you are out of luck.
My TL;DR here is that buying any sort of fancy monitor is just going to make you very unhappy. You will learn everything in the world there is to know about color space math, pixel transition times, using high speed cameras to debug issues (what a time sink), how your brain processes moving images, etc. It won't make you any happier. It won't make you better at programming.
If you play competitive games, get a TN 1080p 240Hz monitor, simply because that's what everyone else uses. Don't use it for anything except the game, because every second that you use it it will make you unhappy. But it's absolutely a joy to play a game on it. (Why 1080p and not 1440p? Guess who bought a 1440p 165Hz monitor. Not anyone that has ever contributed code to the game or played the game at a professional level. But I did! Guess who gets to live with the bugs.)
If you are a programmer, just buy whatever. Every single monitor ever designed will make you unhappy.
If you are a programmer who works with color, get yourself a good therapist. You will be meeting with them on a daily basis, and even then, you'll still be scarred for life. It's all about damage control at this point.