Oh you definitely don't in theory. But you totally do in practice. There's no good reason, it's just the actual experience many people have.

> I spend a lot of time trying out other window managers and compositors or setting up various keybinds or automations I think would be useful, but I don't consider those maintenance tasks.

This is the kind of (in my opinion) low value tedium I'm talking about.

I'm aware that we're talking past each other in these threads. Some people are thinking of software updates, others of us are thinking of stuff like trying out window managers and messing with keybindings, and these are indeed very different kinds of toil.