Would you mind sharing more details about your setup? What do you use to e.g. configure the appearance of Gtk applications (which tend to look ugly when started outside of a DE)?
As it turns out, I've since migrated away from X11 entirely, opting to use Gnome Shell on Wayland. At the time of using sessiond, I paired it with the Awesome window manager and mainly utilized a browser and terminal. I used lxappearance to set Gtk themes for the few relevant applications.