I feel like partially the movement happened because some themes made the apps unusable and then instead of blaming the theming, users blamed thee app developers instead.
That’s not only bad for custom theme users, it’s bad for accessibility since there’s no way for increased contrast modes to modify the hard coded colors. Apps really just shouldn’t hard code colors.
Which is why I really like KDE.
- Requiring apps not to use custom colors alone won’t fix it. Any bespoke UI element an app includes is at risk of breakage when a custom theme redefines the entire world. https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...
If this is not reasonably possible with GTK, then it seems pretty clearly like a weakness of how GTK handles themes. Personally, I believe that CSS is ill-suited for the task and is responsible for many of the issues depicted in that blog post.
When Apple makes a future OS versions they are expected to avoid breaking apps.
The comparison here would be not to future iOS versions, but to arbitrary jailbreak tweaks that overhaul the look system-wide. You're not ensuring that will look good with your app ;)
But people seem to deliberately obscure why the Gnome devs are doing this and instead accuse them of being lazy and/or dictators etc.