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.