One thing that's interestingly unixy about it is that all configuration/interaction is done via a CLI program, herbstclient, which interacts with herbstserver,

One thing that's interestingly unixy about it is that all configuration/interaction is done via a CLI program, herbstclient, which interacts with herbstserver, rather than via config files or an embedded scripting language. So config and scripting is then typically done via a bash script, or whatever other way you prefer to call a series of herbstclient commands. Otherwise its UI model is fairly typical for "manual" (i.e. not auto-layout) tiling WMs.