control is the perfect word for it. they control the hardware. doesnt mean necessarily that they can break it but they can do anything physically possible with it.
i dont have much experience with xmonad but i tried every wm at some point. usually the things that keep me with dwm is that i found a build with very sane defaults and a number of patches i appreciate like swallowing, fake fullscreen(so you can fullscreen a program inside the assigned window) or xresources/pywal integration . i also love the scratchpad implementation and the tag system with a tag 0. i also like dwmblocks for the status bar . now im sure some of this features are available on other wm but i never found all of them in one like on DWM.
i also use ST as terminal and it works great with dwm while it gives me issues with other WM(usually resizing issues)
very MEH bundle the only great game there is disco elysium that usually is discounted at much cheaper