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 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.