> the concept of requiring a workaround because my geaphics drivers aren't functional is something I cannot understand
It's not a workaround, it's just a perk, when I moved to "ultra customized" as you put it, you don't want to have to configure masses of stuff, i3wm is good for this, it's pretty minimal to configure... an XDM was just more work to configure, but with little utility from my perspective, also I work on the cli a lot so it doesn't feel unnatural to be welcomed by a tty.
And yeah the final perk, Linux wasn't always so compatible, and even in more recent history nVidia graphics drivers can still be problematic. About 10 years ago i think, I used Linux on a 2008 MBP, and freeBSD actually, those things had craptastic nVidia GPUs, you know the batch that came with the first gen unleaded soldier fiasco and when nVidia lied to apple about their thermal specs before they had a falling out and everyone got their GPUs underclocked in firmware to push failures out of warrantee - i digress - anyway the linux support for any nvidia stuff back then was terrible, and very flimsy on dual GPU laptops. For Apple it was more tricky still because you needed to write an Apple specific gmux switcher before even attempting to boot with the nvidia driver, and if that actually worked when you start X then you would lose visual access to your tty because it had no modsetting support... which ironically made using tty instead of an xdm a disadvantage for when the graphics driver failed once in X... I sometimes tried to bring it back to life essentially blindfolded on the tty if X died, mixed success.
Point is, on any laptop with nvidia back then, you usually had to do some level of mucking around on the tty anyway before being able to depend on anything graphical like an xdm... and pray it doesn't break on the next driver update. Frankly right now, we are living in Linux utopia, a lot of hardware "just works".