I checked it out and could not wrap my head around Krita tbh. It feels very powerful but focused on solving many different problems, of which photo-manipulation is only one of them.

I need to take another look and give it another try, I don't think I'm done with Krita yet, but it's not a replacement for Gimp yet (as far as I'm concerned.) There's some beauty in having focus.

Photo manipulation is explicitly one of the problems we are not trying to solve with Krita.

Then I'm not sure why the parent comment is implying otherwise.

Well, I cannot look in their mind, but they're not the maintainer of Krita, I am :-).

Here's our current vision statement: https://krita.org/en/item/kritas-updated-vision/