Manjaro i3 in virtualbox - forced to restart i3 to refresh screen content

It seems this is related to the video driver.
In virtualbox you could try to choose another.

What I just did was:
edit the configuration for the compositor (picom).

example:

nano ~/.config/picom.conf

change
backend = "glx"
to
backend = "xrender"

That seems to have done the trick for me in Virt-manager.

HTH