As a long time C and assembly hacker, I certainly know the feeling. However, with were we are going, we have evidence we can do faster on the GPU with various shaders than any of us can do with hand written assembler these days. I anticipate gtk 4.x rendering to vaguely look like webrender (which if you squint hard enough, looks similar to clutter 2.0 design).
> It's also how proper emulations of other operating systems' looks was achieved without an unresponsive set of bitmaps. The general purpose'ness of CSS will inevitably have limitations that either restrict what can be drawn or how efficient it can be made.
Our CSS engine does support SVG for scalability just fine with "bitmaps". The most difficult part of the current win32 theme work (partially landed in 3.20) is that we have lots of widgets that there is simply no analogous in win32. So making a "on|off" toggle look like win32 isn't exactly clear. I haven't tested the new theme on win32, but I do think a bunch of it is improved (note that running the win32 theme on Linux is not the same as running the win32 theme on win32, it requires some internal windows API for some of its features).