My sister has used Photopea. She's as far from a sophisticated computer user as you can get. Regular people can stumble across Photopea, they certainly don't know about GIMP.
If anything, GIMP has brought more people to Linux from the dark side.
It’s actually even bad for students because to create with GIMP you have to do early 90s image editing workflows which are no longer used in real jobs.
It is not like it is extremely well funded or otherwise resource consuming.
> because it exists people treat it like a solved problem
People complaining about lack of alternative projects in open source is a new one for me
> it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.
that is not how free software creation works like, really
The linux distribution model seems to lead it to, somehow. If you open up a RedHat machine and ask it for a picture editor, you're going to get Gimp, even though Krita would almost certainly be better at doing what you want.
(or tried filing any such configuration request in any Linux distribution and got it rejected/ignored?)
If another project had become the de-facto we’d have all those basic features.
Instead we’re stuck with something that almost provides the basics ok, because it exists people treat it like a solved problem, and it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.