> Lazarus never was as good as Delphi GUI-wise
What do you mean? I've been using Lazarus for many years and i used Delphi 2 and 7 before that (mainly 2 though) and i find Lazarus to be an improvement over these versions (AFAIK Delphi 7 was incredibly popular - among Delphi developers anyway - to the point where it was offered for years after newer versions were made).
IMO the main reason is simply that Pascal has lost its "cool" status - and also there is a ton of misinformation out there about it (i even still see people mentioning Kernighan's article on Pascal about why it isn't good, which not only isn't valid anymore -aside from a couple of cosmetic differences- it also wasn't valid in the 90s or really even when he wrote it - though in his defense he was referring to Standard Pascal, but that hasn't been relevant for literal decades).
> and hasn't been updated for modern GUI toolkits, so (unfortunately) it's almost obsolete by now.
Lazarus is a fully volunteer-developed project, so people work on what they want. If you want support for a modern GUI toolkit you basically need to do it yourself (the maintainers are very accepting of external contributors).
Though chances are your info is a bit out of date. As of right now (i use the trunk version since i contribute to Lazarus, though my contributions are certainly on the "old GUI toolkits" side) there is support for Qt6 (which is modern enough in my book :-P) which seems to be at a decent state. Here[0] is an image with Lazarus compiled using the Qt6 backend with a small 3D model viewer i wrote - running Lazarus itself is a litmus test for a backend as the IDE is quite complex.
Of course the neat bit with Lazarus is that you can also use any other toolkit that is supported - in the same image you can see the same exact model viewer running with the Gtk1 backend :-P
[0] https://i.imgur.com/NE2LB3U.png
