e.g. see: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/
This is not an invalid use-case. Not everybody wants to be 100% focused on productivity to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
If you want to have something as simple as a background image, the only way you're going to be able to see it when using a tiling window manager is with gaps or transparency. Small gaps is arguably less intrusive than transparency.
Oh the horror!
It’s kind of weird to me that folks think that aesthetics don’t matter for something that’s so central to one’s life.
The legitimate complaint about/problem with aesthetics is when it becomes the priority and/or hampers functionality. The macOS calendar when it took its extremely skeuomorphic turn was the prime example of this (it was such a poster boy for aesthetics over functionality that Apple responded by getting rid of skeuomorphism altogether).
But aesthetic improvements don’t need to be like that at sll.
There's a small footnote to this, but I think it's true enough to say it like that.
When I came to Linux I quickly got into the unixporn community. After a bit of making Ubuntu look nice, I discovered i3. I then found the gaps patch and rebased it onto the latest version of i3 at the time. Lots of unixporn people liked that and asked me to create a repository for it, so I did -- and i3-gaps was born.
The reason I say it's true enough to say it was born on unixporn is that it's where "a gaps patch" turned into "i3-gaps", and also I reworked so much of that initial small patch that it became something new essentially.