The "don't theme my app" movement is really harmful to the application ecosystem.
Especially true for users with partial visual impairments, but also for other users that want to have a consistent style on their desktops or phones.
Especially true for users with partial visual impairments, but also for other users that want to have a consistent style on their desktops or phones.
The only reason why people care so much for their apps' "branding" is being enforced by product management. Absent that pressure, you get a reversion to the Windows ecosystem pre-2005 (more or less), where every user can make their desktop as nice or ugly as they want, and by and large, the sky isn't falling. Because everyone works with the platform and tries to fit into it instead of breaking the mold.
Again, this letter isn't about users making their desktop nice or ugly; it's about distros applying stylesheets to apps without checking whether the app remains usable, and leading users to expect that this is the app developer's responsibility.
As a user, theming is a powerful feature to make things look somewhat consistent.
Though I use KDE and Qt apps as preference, and very few gnome apps. They tend to cope with this pretty well.
So for me the comparison against KDE is very different. KDE's tools have pretty sane defaults and can be customised very well.
They say that they're not against tinkerers but that's exactly what they've done with libadwaita and libgranite.
They refuse to play nice around theming, user-selected icons, security sandboxes, disabling of tracking functions, providing security updates. Many are careless around the amount of memory or CPU used.
Distributions, instead, are on the side of the end users.
Not for the GNOME shell, unless you're editing the relevant CSS files in /usr/share/themes or installing themes that do so. And if you do end up doing that, you get to see issues like this
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2331
And I wouldn't be surprised if changing fonts became an unsupported feature in future releases because apparently, it was just a hack and not well supported and didn't really work like themes. Apparently, gnome-tweak-tool is an unsupported tool as well.