That last one always pisses me off. "It just gets out of my way". Who sits there and interrupts their thought process because a window animation they've seen a thousand times before happens again?
Not to mention you can turn them off or set eg KDE to functionally look like Xfce.
But then again - they also mention that 'you can tweak' Xfce as a key plus (after the key plus of it being standardised & not offering surprises). I don't think that a plus relative to other popular DEs.
I'm OK with there being articles, but it seems they def had the idea of the format of the article ("top 5 things") before they had the content/the pros drafted.