This is probably a reasonable sentiment in the abstract, but in the concrete instance of UI development, what are we to do? Are there any production quality UI libraries? There are certainly many primitive libraries that can be composed to build a UI library; however, these are largely written in C, so even integrating them into your build is a Herculean effort, and further these tend to be very specialized (accessibility, text rendering, etc) such that you need to be an expert in each sub domain simply to parameterize them correctly. Further still, I suspect there is a lot of cross-cutting concerns, for example, the text rendering library must work well with whichever rendering approach you take for rendering other widgets, accessibility is not easily decoupled from your layout engine or widget library, etc. How much of this is reasonable to take on before it’s more reasonable to throw in the towel and use a framework (or worse: a whole browser)?
Note that the issues the Krita team ran into aren’t a consequence of frameworks in general, but of the management of the Qt framework in particular (although the entire graphics industry deserves lots of blame of their insane, spurious, and ever-changing APIs). Web browsers have much more difficult problems than Qt and manage to provide a relatively stable developer experience. Further, the issue of “your work has to mirror all of their design mistakes”, I think this is a consequence of depending on someone else to write part of your code, irrespective of whether that code is a framework or library; however, the benefit of libraries is that they are usually loosely coupled such that you can relatively easily swap one out for another (but as previously discussed, I don’t think this is the case for UI libraries in practice).
Note that the issues the Krita team ran into aren’t a consequence of frameworks in general, but of the management of the Qt framework in particular (although the entire graphics industry deserves lots of blame of their insane, spurious, and ever-changing APIs). Web browsers have much more difficult problems than Qt and manage to provide a relatively stable developer experience. Further, the issue of “your work has to mirror all of their design mistakes”, I think this is a consequence of depending on someone else to write part of your code, irrespective of whether that code is a framework or library; however, the benefit of libraries is that they are usually loosely coupled such that you can relatively easily swap one out for another (but as previously discussed, I don’t think this is the case for UI libraries in practice).