What does HackerNews think of labwc?

A Wayland window-stacking compositor

Language: C

There are modern minimal Wayland stacking window managers if that's what you are requesting.

Have you looked at

Labwc https://github.com/labwc/labwc

Or

Hikari https://hub.darcs.net/raichoo/hikari

And nwg-shell to give the no frills panels that you want.

https://github.com/labwc/labwc is one I've seen. I don't use these myself, so I can't speak for the quality or anything.