Either way I'd love to see something like krita or GIMP make a mark like blender is starting too. Krita will be the most likely. But it's still way too early to count GIMP out. It's been plodding a long steadily like blender since the 90s. But slower with more attention to the tool kit than the original program it was developed for.

These days the default interface is single window with layouts like classic Photoshop. It has excellent format support. Though they are of course behind a bit on the latest PSD support. But it's very functional. I've also had some issues with JXL in GIMP. Lossy is fine. But lossless is causing my exporting to crash. Krita however does lossless fine. Native plugin-wise is where things have really stagnated a bit. But with gmic integration for both GIMP and krita it's not the pain it could be. And with the major rewrites happening over the last decade it's kind of understandable. Painful but understandable. Just glad they're still at it.

I still remember the pre 1.0 versions on early Slack. Heh it was like a slightly more ambitious quirky version of MS Paint.