The end of the nice GTK button

All of this is pretty much how I feel on the matter, too. GTK3's interface was a really lovely blend of skeuomorphism and more abstract widgets that came together to make a really unique experience. Even if it didn't work in every context, I appreciated how well it worked for less complicated applications and making great-looking, device-agnostic GUIs. Cawbird was a wonderful native Twitter app made possible with GTK3. Curlew packed all of the important features of Handbrake/FFMPEG into a more streamlined, simple package. Foliate took e-book reading into the 21st century. So many amazing apps were enabled with this switch, and even though it's still a second-class toolkit, it was my guilty pleasure on Linux.

In comes GTK4. Much like the article alludes to, the elegant and simple shadow of interactive elements goes poof. Developers spend hundreds of hours crusading against letting people use third-party themes, just so they can simplify and reduce UI elements to a nigh-unusable pulp. Developing with GTK4 is a nightmare. Using GTK4 is a pain in the ass. For christs sake, there was a devastating font-rendering glitch that existed for more than ten months after the first GTK4 release that was ignored in lieu of simplifying buttons, developing a new forced stylesheet and telling people "don't theme our apps!" Whenever I take this up with a maintainer, they immediately take it personally and write out a litany of reasons why I'm wrong and why I'm not allowed to disagree. The priorities here are almost unbelievably misaligned, I've pinned my GTK packages at the last GTK3 release and await some sort of admission of failure.

I simply can't take it anymore. These are the people making desktop Linux miserable, and I frankly feel no remorse watching their attempts at "simplifying" the ecosystem crash and burn.

Can you elaborate? Especially about the first part

For everyone mad at at "Don't theme my apps," consider why developers are doing it.

Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks. And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough.

And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They didn't.

In macOS, you can actually right-click many header bars (like Finder) and choose "Icon and Text" instead of "Icon" for what shows.