There are a lot of little things that daemons like gsettingsd handles, like resolution changes if you add a monitor or change the size of the window you're using your VM in, that you have to do manually if you are not using a desktop environment
I got tired of doing that stuff manually ten years ago, myself. when I plug in a USB stick I just want it to mount, I don't need to wind up reading the mount man page. I have shit to do.
Yeah, many years ago I ran a crunchbang-style setup with openbox and tint2 and while the low resource usage and customizability was great, it was irritating having to find and set up daemons, tray items, etc (all of which seemingly coming with their own list of incapabilities/tradeoffs) for every little thing. I absolutely sympathize with minimizing bloat, but it feels like things like volume keys should fall within the scope of bare minimum out of the box functionality.
I think people who don't use a DE often don't know what they are missing out. (disclaimer, I don't use a DE either).
Most of the time it's just the QoL stuff. Like having it remember resolution and relative positioning of monitors, mouse/touchpad settings, or whatever. These sound insignificant but they do add up.
> Do they want more integration between the WM and the DE?
Yes. I haven't used a DE in well over a decade, but I assume it's for stuff like being able to drag and drop from one window to another, etc.
(Also a happy Awesome user for almost as long as you - although I still haven't learned Lua!)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding OP?
Edit: the comments on the blog post talk about integrations with things like volume management and network management, apparently that's (a|their) defintion of DE vs a WM. Those are not features I care about at all, so maybe I'm not the target audience here. AwesomeWM has plenty of widgets for volume or wifi or whatnot, but I mostly use a terminal.