The lobsters comments rebuking "time spent configuring aesthetics is time wasted" point to the value of experience gained and the tangential pursuits discovered while tinkering. I wholly relate.
Changing the look of something is immediate and easy to show off (to yourself if no one else). It's a rewarding and accessible entrance to tinkering and, in this case, software development in general. The comments mention linux window managers. I think modding a PC game is in the same vein and maybe a more common developer origin story. You change something, like what you see, and learn to do more of that.
In addition to being an accessible and immediately rewarding outlet, aesthetics also help informs if not create identity. As a teenager, it's was empowering to iteratively change how foobar2000 looked or adjust enlightenment themes. It also helped me curate my aesthetic and what I considered valuable. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch — my current setup is ascetic without any visual bells or whistles. But following this thread helps tie to another part of formative identity I'm interested in. My political understanding was in no small part informed by the music I engaged with as a teen (see River City Rebels - Stars N Stripes Bad Religion - American Jesus). Because the power chords resonated with me, I dug into the underlying political component. I liked how KDE looks and now I manage linux servers.
There's more I want to explore when I hopefully have time to revisit this: Despite enjoying Rage Against the Machine when it played over the radio, it took a few decades to appreciate the unfortunately timeless lyrics. I didn't have to work to find the music, so wasn't invested in the same way as with say Bad Religion. (That gives me some sympathy for the cruel hypocrisy/ignorance(?) of Paul Ryan listing RAtM as one of his favorites.) Similarly, if it were too easy to change the asetheics of my computer, would I have been invested?
I've kept the office workstation I use the same since starting: an even-then-outdated Core 2 Duo (2x 3Ghz E8400, c. 2008) w/DDR2 RAM (but 12Gb of it). In the long time since, among many other changes, we've moved from yahoo messenger to slack. This transition is representative. Generic enterprise and organization tools are more web based, more capable, and much less performant.
In migrating to slack, I initially stuck with pidgin (first using the XMPP bridge, then via slack-libpurple). I've slowly moved into weechat w/weeslack inside tmux. With a similar velocity, I've slowly honed my email kludge dance involving crontab, davmail, mbsync, notmuch, emacs, and sometimes nebula or reverse ssh.
I'd interpreted my move to terminal bound interfaces as a developing graybeard accreting eccentricities. Or, at least as a cantankerous resistance to the inconvenience of multi-factor authentication. I'd similarity self-identified the strong desire and subsequent efforts to eschew firefox for w3m or eww as part of the same descent into the arcane.
Dan Luu's essay(?) allowed me to be kinder to myself. Jeff Atwood really is hostile to my old hardware browsing experience. And probably more importantly, my coworkers with new Macs don't experience the lag I do in web-based tools.
I recently snapped the plastic case below the hinge of my personal laptop (c. 2012). Hedging against a possible mend, I've been scoping out possible replacements. My primary usage is text/source code editing. For that, I'd have thought my current processing power sufficient. Still I rarely have a good time browsing around the greater internet. Do I really need a top of the line computer just for that!?
Compared to the math, stats, and modeling I'm working on or the crazy things I ask text editors to do, rendering forums and articles or even editing rich text seems like a low computation burden. However, when I sort htop by CPU or RAM usage, firefox (and it's many children) are almost always at the top.
df -h $PWD Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/fedora-root 546G 442G 104G 82% /
grep model\ name -m1 /proc/cpuinfo model name : AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor
sed 1q /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 30751332 kB[0]: using an impoverished org-babel like exec in vim: $y^:!r^R"