oh ffs, don’t be pedantic. It provides a desktop environment, if you select one - we use xfce as best of the bunch.
My point isn’t the window manager, it’s the whole ecosystem. It’s the million little hidden folders clogging up your home directory, it’s the haphazard set of default graphical apps that get installed, it’s having to fuck around to get dbus running by default for the handful of applications that silently timeout and die without it, it’s having to delete lockfiles for users after a crash, it’s the general production values of a 90s shareware cdrom.
Just imagine trying to get general admin staff set up with that, and trying to support them - It’d be as horrible and painful as trying to set up developers or your network infrastructure under windows.
And at the end of the day, 90% of the things you need your desktop environment for are admin-staff kinds of tasks. Poking around on the web, mail, media, printing (and of course video games), which are just better and easier without the all propeller-hat shit.