Agreed, it seems the "big deal" here is using a rust-native toolkit, iced[0], rather than just slapping together another reskinned gtk-based solution like most similar submissions do.
So this is potentially a really cool thing, not just somebody tinkering with stylesheets.
Probably the HN crowd is a bit jaded because of all the hyperbolic "low effort" distros/DEs that are just modified ubuntu/GNOME, but these folks seem to be legit.
Yeah, I'm also very excited for cosmic, and a solid modernize toolkit for the longer run future as well.
My understanding is that the point of developing cosmic is to enable distros and users to address UI issues in the first place, since GNOME is too limiting.