That would have made this article so much more useful to me.

Without screenshots it was difficult to see why I might want one of these plugins.

It would also have been nice to have some written motivation for using them, as well as a description of what they do and the problem they solve.

That's a very good idea! I feel that, to some extent, screenshot could replace lengthy explanations weaved through the code in configs similar to the linked one...

I have quite a lot of custom Elisp in my config - more than 1.5k loc - and it's well commented and should be readable, but it lacks any commentary/narrative which is what makes reading things like this interesting. Would you like to read it if I added a little bit of additional text and a screenshot for every larger section of the config?

I think I'll try doing this - I'm poor at writing and it takes me way longer to describe something well than just creating a screenshot.