I believe he means that he switched to GTK because Qt is moving away from traditional desktop widgets (in favour of QML / QtQuick) and he didn’t want to go that way.
Hm that's a bummer. It sounds like it's taking the Electron path then? Because that's exactly what I was trying to avoid.
The code is also compiled to native code, but it's written declaratively. It's not for everyone, but it's not the same as Electron. Even still you have the option to use the traditional imperative API.