DWM is obviously not competing with GNOME or KDE and is quite a niche window manager. However, by focusing on being a simple, hackable tool—rather than adding menus, settings, help pages, and so on—it remains reliable and easy to maintain. Each DWM user typically has their own set of carefully selected patches and can (re)compile/(re)install it as a single binary in just two or three minutes.

No one is forced to use it, but the overall experience is quite convincing.