I never use the maximize button because I double click somewhere on the title bar. Why use a tiny button instead of a conveniently large area? When first installing Linux Mint years ago, I was going through the settings and noticed I could customize the buttons. I made the middle button, maximizing, empty and now just have more space between the minimize and close buttons.

It's perfect.

As a bonus tip, remapping double click to right click (also a setting in Cinnamon, don't need external software for this) also makes it way nicer to use (I never use the right click menu - after all, the buttons I regularly need are already right there and there's another button on the left for opening the menu, or you can use alt+space+t).

In Classic Mac OS, the close button was on the other side of the window for the reason described in the article. It joined the others probably for familiarity for Windows users.