Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.
System76 is best known for spreading misinfo and lies about GNOME and other upstreams, selling overpriced re-branded clevos, “being made in America”, loving rust and hyping on twitter and mastodon.
Most of the “backlash” against GNOME comes from the a community that has more opinions than users or just straight up misinformation and spite.
COSMIC is very poorly designed, it might be written in the “memory-safe programming language” but it’s clear that they don’t have a design backbone. They basically created the caricature of GNOME’s adwaita but now you can paint your windows in whatever barf-inducing color you want.
They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time, literally every issue that sparked that redesign was resolved upstream in both aforementioned desktops.
The native Linux look and feel is not a real thing. It was a coincidence created by the fact that gnome and gtk was, as you mentioned, the de facto Linux toolkit and the design culture at the time.
Unless youre advocating for a world where everyone must be forced to compile down to gtk, you’re welcome to keep your revisionism to yourself.
What are you even talking about. Of course native look and feel existed as something that both application developers and users desire.
It’s not an absolute but an application can feel out of place or it can fit into a desktop environment.