I'll grant that the standard shipped themes for most window managers are kind of lifeless, but that's just a function of popularity. Any such project that wants to have mainstream adoption has to...be mainstream, ya know?

Like, gnome/kde/etc can't ship some solarpunk slippy slidy tiling config for the same reason that Word can't save-and-exit with :wq

But the customization is alive and strong!

Compiz-style effects live on in gnome, cinnamon, hyprland...

hyprland in general lets you config just about anything.

WaylandCraft is a thing [0]

I personally use sway as I can just run all my windows without the chrome as windows are meant to be.

[0] https://github.com/EVV1E/waylandcraft

oh, and reddit link below the fold, but look at this thing and tell me customization is dead: https://www.reddit.com/r/hyprland/comments/1tw5x6e/final_ric...

A lot of detailed customisation options seemed to fall away after the big interest in customising everything reduced, rather than before. Back in the 00s many of us wanted things to be ours and part of our expression, and themes/skins were an active art form. [thinks wistfully back to the days of WinAmp, Enlightenment, and so forth]

Now many (like myself) who tinkered to make their setup just so now just want things to work but perhaps with a few custom options (wallpaper, overall app chrome colours, a few tweaks to the syntax highlighting & folding in our editors), and most “general public” users care even less, so there isn't the demand to warrant maintaining the extra code needed to allow more complete customisation at the window manager or app level. For those that want that, fun tools like this pop up.