Arbitrarily sizing all four edges of windows and having them overlap (partially visible, partially hidden) is a waste of time.
Almost always, you either want to look at a window completely or not at all. And you either want to look at 1 window, or maybe 2 or 3 or 4 and so have them either full-screen or tiled.
You generally don't need them overlapping and don't need to show desktop space behind them either.
Modern productivity interfaces are mostly all full-sized windows with tabs and sidebars now, not child windows and floating palettes like in 1995 or 2000. (Modal dialog boxes are still needed of course, but I don't think the author means those.)
No one cares about the pseudo modern bullshit. Those interfaces that you mean are more close to the Xeroc Park ironically, than to a modern floating window manager/desktop.
It's like the more bullshit of so called modern-Material desktop. FFS, Helvetica and brutalism predate like you like 70 years in design, and Motif/CDE/Windows9x interface got brutalism and FUNCTIONALISM right from the beginning.
Material is good for paper-printed books and traffic signs/urban panels, not for a working and interacting device. The same happens with mobile interfaces and Gnome 3: they suck a lot on non-consumer devices. Guess why.
Many people are using high-res monitors now, which invariably come with software to allow quickly snapping windows to a portion of the screen, creating a grid layout where there is no overlapping, and no desktop space either.
This already exists, right now. And I'd say that solutions like the one I describe are better, because they are completely customisable, and I can make windows full screen or minimise them as needed.
Arbitrarily sizing all four edges of windows and having them overlap (partially visible, partially hidden) is a waste of time.
Almost always, you either want to look at a window completely or not at all. And you either want to look at 1 window, or maybe 2 or 3 or 4 and so have them either full-screen or tiled.
You generally don't need them overlapping and don't need to show desktop space behind them either.
Modern productivity interfaces are mostly all full-sized windows with tabs and sidebars now, not child windows and floating palettes like in 1995 or 2000. (Modal dialog boxes are still needed of course, but I don't think the author means those.)