@MischievousTomato @EdBoatConnoisseur @PhenomX6 @RL_Dane @safiuddinkhan as for mate and xfce? they're tried to the hip with gnome and will inevitably follow whatever gnome pushes into GTK3, or GTK4.
At least the TDE guys had the balls to fork QT3 to keep the KDE3 experience alive while the mate devs dance around trying to keep the GNOME 2 experience with the now uglified GTK3 and GTK4. They'd rather port their software over to that crap than just fork and freeze GTK2.