Deciduous plants spend roughly five months of the year here without leaves, and whether that is a cost or a feature depends entirely on whether the planting was designed for it.
It is also why they are the easier half of the catalog on this ground. A dormant plant loses almost no water. An evergreen beside it is still transpiring through a dry January wind into frozen ground it cannot draw from — which is why winter burn is an evergreen problem and not a deciduous one, and why most of the toughest, lowest-water plants here are deciduous.
Bare is also useful. A deciduous tree on the south or west side of a house shades it in July and lets the sun through in January, which is a thing no evergreen can do. The same applies to a bed under a window.
And bare is not nothing to look at. Red twigs against snow, peeling bark, held fruit, a good silhouette — the structure of a deciduous planting in January is a real part of the design, and the plantings that read as empty in winter are the ones where nobody thought about it.