You may also want to update your setup or use a compositor like picom if you want any kind of real transparency effects, X11 compositing is about 15 years old now so I think not having it would qualify as "extremely out of date" in software years...

I am not really a fan of transparency and other effects.

The option is there for you if you need it, at some point you may find that apps require it, and trying to hack around it could be impractical.