> It lets me concentrate on the things that matter

I don’t know if it’s the case of me being old-ish, but you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve been using i3 with pretty much the same dot files for well over a decade, simply because it stays the hell away from the work I am doing.

Same here but with Xfce. It's a trajectory I've seen in many comments. Starting out trying every new DE, customizing them, etc. Eventually ending up on one DE for a decade plus and not even bothering to change the default wallpaper.

At some point, or maybe past a certain age, fucking around with desktop and window manager configurations stops being entertaining. You just want something that has consistent, sane defaults, works with no fuss, and otherwise stays out of your way.