This article was written in the sense of bashing gnome but yet some points seem to be valid. It explains the history of gtk 1 to 4 and the influence of gnome in gtk. I’m not saying gnome is bad here, instead I find this an interesting to read and I’m sharing it.
If you love gtk2 so much why don’t you marry it?
:P I love developing with Qt but Ill take gnome over KDE most days.
I’ve been using GNOME for like a decade, and recently switched to hyprland, but KDE 6 looks really promising, looking forward to trying it out.