If you want to avoid the techno-machoism (did you mean machoism or masochism? I thought you meant the latter, but realised it works either way though with different implications), find a tiling window manager that supports making windows floating, as that's really the one thing that is sometimes painful with some of them - if you e.g. start an application that opens tons of small windows (gimp used to be one of the great test cases for this - though now you can run gimp with few windows if you want).

But for me I picked a setup liked this because I was simulating it with a regular WM anyway by running almost everything maximised because that's how I liked it. I was happy to squint at tiny text when I was younger, and I used to care more about having a desktop that looked cool, and spent endless time on themes etc., but I got tired of it, and now I want functional. I still care that it looks good, but with less window-chrome there's less effort involved: I have a background image that's part visible behind my terminals; I have a theme I like for Chrome etc., and that's about it.

If you meant machoism: This kind of set up is far less flashy and in your face. If you mean masochism: For me at least this setup has removed friction and lowered the effort of managing windows, not increased it. I'm not using this setup to make this unnecessarily austere and minimal, but to remove stuff that got in my way.

I can understand the feeling though: It used to be painful to run these kind of setups. When the article was written there was definitively more applications that worked poorly with that generation of tiling window managers etc.