It's not just GNU/Linux what people show in unixporn: some rice macOS, some rice BSD, and some even rice Android. What do they have in common? They're all based on UNIX.
st. It just works. I'm always opening and closing terminals, and 90% of the stuff I use have's a TUI. st launches before I can even notice, under 4GB of RAM, and the entire install is less than a MiB.
I think they're talking about the tandem of tiling and workspaces, as usually you can customize your tiling per-workspace. Some TWMs have tags instead of workspaces, making it even better.
*they're
grammar police