Iirc, gnome also got a million from the Sovereign Tech Fund a while back (I think it was them + that amount of money, don't quote me on this).
Imo: both are good and deserve it. They sometimes have different ways of thinking and goals, but both are usible for everyone - even for non-techies.
While I'm a gnome fanboy, it's really cool to see financial support for good desktops!
For me, it was the docs and seemingly being more straightforward. Nix always seemed like something I'll never understand because of it's many ways to do things while having hard to follow docs at times, but guix made sense to me. Nix obviously has it's clear upsides over guix - both are good!
Thats very fair! Similarly, I looked at r/unixporn and wanted whatever they have. I gotta admit - that WAS a motivation for me hahaha
Other DEs or gui frameworks support proper theming, adwaita has it's reasons to ignore it. I'd love to see/hear about cool things you can do with qt theming or whatever, but whenever I got theming related things on my screen, it's about how adwaita/gnome sucks and will kill your childlike wonder
I honestly don't get the adwaita hate. These apps try to be simple and functional. This is the software for normal people who just want things to work. I used to care about theming my desktop a lot, but I'd rather have apps where form follows function (is that how you use that phrase?)
And there are projects that do bring almost enough theming to adwaita ("almost" = I saw 1 issue for me - rewaita is still pretty amazing): https://github.com/SwordPuffin/Rewaita
Helix: Barely needs a config. But they are also pretty close to done with a plug-in system for the stuff that isn't implemented by default :D
If you care about the app being open source, I've used Energized: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.flasskamp.energize/
Worked well enough for me, but my needs are low ๐