Gnome introduced a hard-dependency on systemd (and later denied it / claimed it had been an accident) in what looked very much like a deliberate move to force distros to ship systemd.

Not parent , GNOME is not a community project, there seems to be one or a few big ego persons that do not even use GNOME and that push a "vision".

Like they wanted CSD and they decreed that everyone, even non-GNOME apps like old games that nobody works on should implement CSD because they are not going to be backwards compatible.

Same with notifications, old apps, third party apps should implement the GNOME way, they do not care for supporting non-GNOME stuff.

But more power for them, they self select a niche user, a "GNOME user" that either is compatible with the GNOME way or they will contort themselves into it.

Their relentless push of design choices that I find intolerable is what eventually drove me to ditch Gtk in favor of Qt for my personal projects, and leave Xfce in favor of Plasma on my desktop. What a relief it has been. It's important to me that my UI be something I actually want to use.

Same here. GNOME is a powerful force driving people away from Gtk and towards Qt.

I always preferred Qt over GTK just from quality POV, if you are not a C++ hater then Qt is perfect for cross platform professional looking apps.

And about this designers forcing their shit on users, I hit lately a issue with GTK apps where the windows of the app and popups are hard coded and you can't resize them. Because of my bad eyes I use a giant font size and this apps are unusable (I need to research if is possible to trick this windows at runtiem that they are allowed to resize)