I used ratpoison/ion3 from about 2000 through 2007 and then switched to OSX. So I never saw this ...
You're saying that in modern Xwin/Xorg, the actual applications have title bars and so on ... such that if I were using RP/ion I would see the titlebars ?
Is that what you're saying ?
Go open the Steam client on Linux, it is using CSD so it always has min / max / close in the top right.
(That's my understanding from the pro-CSD crowd, I'm personally pro-SSD, so I may have misunderstood unintentionally, but I think I'm being as charitable as possible in the above interpretation/description.)
You'll see the titlebars anyway because they contain worthwhile controls now. You know, like with Chrome putting the close buttons on the tab bar. Evince (a document viewer) has the page number, back-next, find, annotate button, zoom controls, options dropdown and a lil' more on there, for example.
The other thing is that the control buttons you won't want are opt-out:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B#Client-side_deco...