Dude. Optimize for your 99% use case. I spend ten minutes a week on someone else's machine. Does that really make it a bad idea to remove warts and add niceties to my machine? Assuming you aren't literally a stump it should be easy enough to go back to the defaults.

I wonder if it says something about how brittle software and their interactions tend to be: many very experienced computer users tend to promote a certain minimalism. Not for minimalism's sake, but apparently because their computers are in such a delicate and brittle state that any superfluous may brake it, and they have to expend a lot of effort to get it back to that same state. And also the fact that they aren't able to customize whatever other machine they have to use for any considerable time, probably because the administrator won't let you tweak anything (again, because it might break/introduce vulnerabilities etc. Again, it's in a brittle state).

I disagree. You should be able to use a basic terminal, but you're not living your developer life in a series of hotels - most of the work you're doing is probably on your own machine.