I agree to an extent but the thought of having an application spread across seven or eight windows makes me feel nauseous.

It can be a good way to make use of smaller screens (e.g. on laptops). Multiple "virtual desktops" makes it easier to manage

It helps that you can press Command+Option+H to hide all other windows (from other applications) to reduce clutter.

I use many, many windows and tools to help me switch including virtual desktops. Carryover from X11 days.

Yeah, it's like everyone fell in love with the X/Athena widgets all of a sudden. I'd never have guessed that after all these years we'd go back to UIs looking like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets#/media/File:S...