In a way I'm one of those developers. I was drawn to GNOME ecosystem when I saw how much effort was invested into renewing and modernizing the stack around the turn of the decade, with flatpak, GTK4, libadwaita, the HIG, etc.

I definitely wasn't the only one who jumped on the GNOME train back then, because it seems like the effort that has been invested into the platform is really paying off now with all these cool apps appearing.