My focus has always been on being able to work without issue. Without OS locking up or without tools malfunctioning.
Used to have laptops with 256MB RAM for example, or 1024x768 pixel resolution. So I'd do anything to cram as much as possible into a tiny screen using as little resources as possible.
Now my laptop has 8G of RAM and an i7 CPU at 2.5GHz and 4 virtual cores. On top of that Linux and Gnome have made a lot of advances so it runs like a dream and I can work without having ~100 lines of configuration in my WM.
More seamlessly go from my own to someone elses computer without forgetting that caps lock is my Meta key. It all pretty much resembles Windows and Mac OS more.
I just don't see any purpose with torturing myself using a minimal resource desktop environment when I don't have to.
The main program is still gnome-terminal and tmux, I still do a majority of my work there. Habitually use cli for as much as possible, even simple operations that I could do in the Gnome file browser.
But I do it all with a vanilla Gnome configuration and I still don't miss a thing.