I've never really understood the attraction of focus follow mouse, and it's especially confusing to me when the preference comes from someone who professes to mostly navigate using the keyboard.
I'm sure that if I had learned windowing system on a Mac or Windows PC, I'd find that natural and I'd have developed different work styles. But I've got thirty years of experience with highly flexible window managers and miss these features on less capable systems.
When I'm not using the mouse, I change the focus with the keyboard (In my setup, focus follows mouse only when the mouse moves).
In my setup, focus follows mouse only when the mouse moves
That makes much more sense to me.