To be fair, as you say, Qt definitely has shortcomings and some things I don't like. If you're trying to minimize your disk space footprint, it's hard to get anything under 50MB with Qt. The difficulty of navigating the licensing for a closed-source app is (while often exaggerated) quite real, especially for someone using Qt for the first time. And while I understand why they did it, it's often annoying to have to use the Qt equivalents of standard library types (e.g., don't use std::string...use QString! don't use int64_t...use qint64! etc.)
The problem is there really just isn't a perfect library or tool for building desktop apps, and writing your own would be...a lot of work. I share the linked post's distaste for Electron, which without a lot of work tends to result in horribly bloated software (often very nice look and feel, but bloated just the same). GTK sounds nice in principle, but you very quickly find yourself missing all of the functionality built into Qt. So Qt often for me ends up being like what someone once said about democracy: it's the worst system EXCEPT for all the other alternatives we've tried from time to time...all of which are worse.