Sometimes I wish Mate would have also forked GTK2. GTK3 is just heavier in general and going forward, GTK4 seems to be even more Gnome focused, so a fork might become inevitable anyway.
From a developer standpoint, I actually really liked how composable GTK3 was. It's fair to complain about the stylesheets and the funky touch-centric interface, but it did still let you build GTK2-style apps. It was full of weird/nice features and felt like a decent iteration on GTK2. GTK4 has been a waking nightmare in comparison, and I'm not sure why they feel obligated to throw out so much of the previous toolkit.
