Arguably I'd rather write stone age Pascal vs [hype web language], specially on the desktop platform, even if it means sacrificing niceties such as good IDE support.
You mean it is tried and tested and stable? Pascal has continued to evolve just as its counterpart C does today (it's actually a branding problem that makes people think Pascal hasn't evolved at all - there has been upgrades made to Pascal, which were released under different names that has resulted in this misunderstanding). It still remains one of the few languages that can match the performance of C (or even outperform it) while feeling simpler than C.
I am a professional C++ developer what happens to work often with Qt developers and I assure you, the skill-set you acquire while developing on Qt does not transfer at all to plain, standard C++, and vice-versa.
What I would really like is a 'modern-C++-ic' binding for Qt.
The closest thing to something acceptable for non-trivial projects using Qt that I found was NodeGui. But as soon as I realized I had to make some very verbose C++ bindings to qtmultimedia all the energy for the project went away. If this one attempt with Gtk4 fails I might come back to that since it looks like it has matured since then.
I needed QMediaPlayer support at least, since that's what I tried to start with. Probably that's all the program would still need.
Why not just design UI in Glade, then load it and bind handlers to UI elements?
Lazarus requires you to write your application in a Pascal derivative. People overall don't want to learn another language, much less one that's not "hip".
I for one don't care about having to learn another language or how old it is. But Pascal is not only old, it is antiquated. Standard ML is old, but it still beats the pants off what most people are using out there in expressiveness.
And FWIW: I started writing a Gtk4 application this weekend using Rust and Relm4. Relm4 macros don't get Rust Analyzer support and builder pattern is going back to the stone ages of procedural UI building. I miss something like what I had with VB6 which also represents the good ideas behind Lazarus, but neither compare to the sheer productivity of something like web Elm or React+TypeScript.