I have seen several threads on Qt on HN in the past and was always quite surprised on the takes in the comments section here, especially on Qml, but never bothered to write up a reply so far.

I myself am mainly a C programmer, doing low level stuff, with occasional detours into C++ projects.

In 2019/2020, I worked on a larger project replacing a web based UI on an embedded device with something Qt based, not having touched Qt since version 4. Due to some of my older spare time projects, I have somehow become the go-to graphics guy in our company, but usually those issues revolve around questions like "why does the display bridge do those bizarre things?". This projects was IMO a quite interesting excursion outside of fiddling with graphics drivers.

Yes, I was a bit put of by Qml at first too, but eventually found it a breeze to work with. Qml is a language for designing both the UI layout and UI level interactions. Writing code and trying it out was a very refreshing change from having to fiddle with some IDEs Visual UI designer. I managed to cobble together complete mock-up clone of some of the existing UI screens in only an afternoon, rather than e.g. 3 or 4 days as originally budgeted in some cases, spending the rest of the time on "fine tuning" and starting with the back-end integration.

Combined with Qts emphasis on Model-View-Delegate design this allowed us to very cleanly separate the UI from the actual logic, to the point were the UI would work like a LEGO brick stuck on top of the application logic.

Even as a die hard C programmer, I would say I liked working with Qml and it is definitely something they did right.