Have you ever tried to develop GUI applications for GNOME versus macOS/Windows tooling?
It's a bit of an exaggeration, but I've written the whole Linux application in the same time that I needed to get my build environment working on Windows. I still don't know how people can like developing on Windows, especially if it involves anything regarding C/C++ libs. (Not using a paid version of Visual Studio, fwiw).
The fact that you lack the experience with proper Windows development tooling kind of shows, it isn't an exageration, otherwise you would realize how stone age is anything Gtk+ related, specially after Glade was killed.
I dunno, I've used Qt. You can argue that it's not "proper windows development tooling" and I can argue that 90% of apps I've written in my life have benefitted from being cross-platform. Happy to be corrected here, but I've seen most hobbyists not use Visual Studio because historically you had to pay for it in the first place, and it's only common between Windows-only devs, to no surprise.
Qt isn't GNOME either.
Visual Studio has had free express editions, before community was introduced, since 2010.
Even those express editions were more feature rich than GNOME tooling.
If you use the Visual Studio build system the way it's designed to be used and use vcpkg to manage your third party libraries, then C++ on Windows is pretty great, even when using the free version of Visual Studio.
Trying to force a UNIX shaped build environment and development setup into a Windows shaped hole on the other hand can be a pain.
Have you used gnome shell in the last five years?
My desktop experience on Linux is so clean. Everything is a "windows" key press away. I hit they then enter the first characters of the program name. It's all composited and GPU accelerated too, and interaction is instantaneous.
Almost anything that needs additional polish is on the web and looks the same on every computer...
For me, what seems janky is stuff with the systems on MacOS (planned hardware obsolescence = jank, batteries that die after a predetermined number of years, expanding until they break the motherboard = jank) or the user treatment and configuration of Windows (the article in question gives a lovely example of windows jank). In short, being treated like a consumer = jank. I can't understand how anyone puts up with it, much less says "polished" when referring to it. But I'll admit I'm weird!