Screwing around, feet up on desk. One hand for beer, one for rodent, all the overlapping windows and flashy animation nonsense is fine.

Here, this is my working position.
Therefore, the mouse and DE with a maximum of GUI to configure everything.

And secondly, if cli, then you should at least try to fulfill the ergonomic requirements, position the keyboard in the desired position, angle at the elbow joint, etc.

Then it will work out with all your fingers and blindly, but the pose is practically the only one for the whole day.

Eventually this led me to use Ratpoison as my WM: a completely keyboard-driven tiling WM that has no overlapping windows (don't need 'em) and no need to take your hands off your keyboard.

Haven't used it in a while, but Ratpoison is almost certainly still awesome. Also, the post that started it all is hilarious (and kinda true IME ).

Personally I have 2 modes of operation:
Screwing around, feet up on desk. One hand for beer, one for rodent, all the overlapping windows and flashy animation nonsense is fine.
Not screwing around, both hands on keyboard and rodent well out of the way. Usually that means CLI, in an old-school tty or a console window either fullscreen or tiled 50/50 with some other (usually a manual or another console) window.

Fortunately KDE can do both, though admittedly it's not as efficient as a dedicated tiling WM at the latter. Ratpoison would be my go-to if kwin ever looses it's configurable keyboard shortcuts or if it didn't do custom tiling modes. (which at the rate KDE is stripping features for "modern" aesthetics wouldn't surprise me).

This thread has me thinking I need to learn how to do this 'windowing environment only' without a desktop style of computer use.

I first got into Unixes and Linux in my college years, back in the 90's. It was on the university's computer lab, running SunOS/Solaris with X servers running on thin clients connecting to the central compute server. The window manager was twm, an ancient WM that nevertheless did its job.  The stuff that came later, esp. the whole "desktop metaphor" nonsense that started with MS Windows and later trickled down to Linux "desktops" like GNOME never appealed to me -- I was never one to be happy with what I was handed, I want to be in control.  So I stuck with twm, and later with various more modern incarnations of it.

After a while, though, I started to think to myself, what do I really need a WM for?  Most of the time, what I really do is just work on one application at a time, e.g., a text editor editing code, or browser to browse online. Why do I need to waste time fiddling with windows that partially overlap each other and mouse focus issues and all of that nonsense?  Eventually this led me to use Ratpoison as my WM: a completely keyboard-driven tiling WM that has no overlapping windows (don't need 'em) and no need to take your hands off your keyboard.  Also, super lightweight -- all you need is literally a bare bones X server, and ratpoison itself. No toolbars, no window deco, all your apps get maximum screen space to do their stuff. Split-second switching between windows.  Split the display into two tiled panes when you need to look at more than one window at a time (I find this quite rare IME, but of course YMMV). None of the bloat that "modern" "desktop environments" bring with them. Everything is lightning fast without needless eye-candy.

Well this is probably a bit too extreme for you, but just wanted to say that it's actually possible. ;-)

You do need to add libmodule-build-perl to install the module manually.

wanna see how it turns out.

Found an old machine I forgot I even had, it's even older than my daily user which is 12 years old or so, this one's probably 15 or better. Lady gave it to me a long time ago, It was a Windows Vista machine, and had ground to a complete halt, and she wanted me to try and retrieve her old files and pics and such, so I did, but I also put an early version of Vuu-do (Devuan 1) with the MATE desktop to make it useable for her again, but when I brought the machine back to her she had already bought a new one but was so happy I saved here files she just gave me the old one, and it's been sitting unused for some 5 years. Seriously old and low-spec with just a gig of ram.

Pulled it out and it fired right up, using it in the garage right now playing internet radio and running sound through my shop system. And it's actually quite zippy, even the old Palemoon browser still works and is pretty fast.

And at idle it only uses about 190 mb of ram, as opposed to my current MATE system which is using around 660 and a little cumbersome even with better specs and 4 gigs of better ram. And the system is MUCH larger than that old MATE system, probably roll the whole thing into an 800 mb iso.

Lotsa factors in that equation I know, but GTK3 and Wayland and pulse and such are definitely part of it.

And though they are much smaller than 6 years ago and everything is a little better, people are still using SVG's for icons and it's still slowing down my menus.

All the little stuff matters when added all together IMHO.

But i'm excited, found all my old notes, downed the netinstall iso, and am preparing to do new Vuu-do!

why is wayland bad

It's not that it's "bad" per-se, it's that adoption is being aggressively pushed while it's still rather buggy, lacks a number of features people are used to from X11, and only really works properly at all with GNOME sessions.
Much the same as we saw with udev, dbus and systemd, and as we're now seeing with pipewire... which are (totally coincidentally I'm sure) products of the same group of interconnected organisations.

What used to be the preferred flexible and DE agnostic FOSS widget toolkit is now the GNOME toolkit, where stable ABIs and non-gnome use cases are given precious little consideration (and in some cases actively discouraged, see somewhat infamous "Decide if you are a GNOME app or not" quote and obnoxious attitude given to KDE devs trying to make GTK apps fit in on plasma), and in spite of solid user demand customisation and theming options are removed to protect the "GNOME brand" and the holy HIG.
On top of that, it's big and it's slow.

dont get me wrong, i would prefer if everything would work with motif and xenocara, but i understand the drama

I presume you meant "I don't understand the drama"??

My answer would be because of less end-user customization allowed. (If I'm wrong on this point, someone correct me.)

dont get me wrong, i would prefer if everything would work with motif and xenocara, but i understand the drama

Not at all, no login screen
This is my computer, I am the only user, so WM is configured for automatic passwordless login.

“Minimalism” usually results in poking at the keyboard instead of just clicking on an application icon or menu item.

you can't ignore the various features that a display manager provides. For example ...

I would like to add another example, which was a must in my work: the capability to be used in a multiuser environment, like the computer lab in a high school. For this to work as I wished, I had to fiddle a bit the configuration to not show a list of users (for security) and forget last user (for convenience). Last time I did (I'm retired now), kdm checked all the boxes.

Even for programing my own software I use the GTK3. I did not want to use GTK2 and then have distros pull support for GTK2

As far as display managers.  I agree that it's something you can do without, and is mostly just polish. With that said you can't ignore the various features that a display manager provides. For example the able to power off or restart without having to login, and don't forget auto-login.  Not really killer features, but I'm sure their are those who greatly appreciate such features and use them every day. If I'm creating an Live Linux ISO to be used by others I'm going to provide a display manager.

My problem with display managers is that there just are not any good ones. They either pull in a crazy number of depends.or are so basic is not much better then just using the console. Yes slim is simple but why do I do a need the root password to shutdown the system on a system that's configured to shutdown without a password?

Here's my hacked-up fork of MATE. It's based on an old version that doesn't depend as much on "modern" XDG libraries and retains the light, familiar form and function of GNOME 2. If there's enough interest on something like this, I can clean it up and start a proper project.

Food for thought maybe;
I get that login managers are "pretty" but does the appearance really serve any purpose? How much time do you spend interacting with your login screen and what has it done for you lately ? 

For my case - they carry all this baggage that really has nothing to do with the apps you actually USE,  - and along with that baggage comes wondering how your system got roped into installing wayland, or gtk3, or even having no idea what is running in the first place.

VLC has too many dependencies? Dump it ! MPV is great !  (at least for me I understand maybe not same for everyone)

I think we all have this natrual tendency to conflate what is actually (non-functional) "eye candy"  with being "easier" or "better".

Another consideration, for some apps where available - using a portable statically built AppImage in your home directory can sometimes spare you from a myriad of undesireable dependencies.

Anyway - there are minimally dependent standalone alternatives to just about everything as some pointed out already in this thread. Its not perfect, and dependencies still happen - but I think part of how we retain freedom of choice is by finding, sharing, adapting and making use of those.

Freedom and sensible minimalism converge yet again!