Comment by Twey

Sure, I buy that window managers are, on the whole, not capable of the things that people want them to be capable of. My gripe is more that, instead of improving existing window managers to do those things or building a new one with the features people clearly need, developers choose to build their own special-purpose window manager with the features their app benefits from the most and then embed it into their app so those features can't be used with other apps. It reflects, IMHO, a culture of siloing technological developments to the (financial) benefit of their developers and the detriment of users.

XMonad supports tabbed groups, by the way, as (apparently) do i3wm, Sway, and Hyprland.

> Well, in the example of image editors i mentioned, these windows are views to the underlying image documents - and being able to move and resize those views arbitrarily, together with a caption about the document they're about, is very useful.

Sure, it is. That is also exactly the set of features of a window manager :)