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...