It was, as the article says, a bit of a shock & felt like a downgrade switching to window managers with preset layouts. Having arbitrarily subdividable screens was amazingly flexible & let you iterate nicely as you worked.
The article talks about configuration, about the downside of Lua, specifically that awesomewm seemingly changed their API & caused disruption. I wasn't ever very great with wmii scripting, but it was still one of thr coolest experiences of my life, in that it was 9p based. The state of the wm was all exposed as files one could manipulate. It was incredibly simple & powerful. It meant you could write scripts in anyanguahe at all, could easily read thr current state, was so universal & powerful & graspable. Wmii is still one of the greatest examples of general systems I've dealt with & I miss that universality dearly.