It's a groupthink issue anyways. 3DSmax/Maya was the same for a long time, and "everyone" was saying Blender is not an alternative. And then some big companies switched to Blender and suddenly people stopped complaining about it. And while Blender did improve during that time, it did not improve so substantially that it really made all the difference.

Based. Just curious, what do you use for vector editing software? (For Illustrator-type work)

this pretty much. Everytime i see people bitching about editors and editing, it's almost always keybinds. Which is literally a skill issue. Or something will be organized slightly differently, also a skill issue. Or it's feature set will be like, marginally different.

It's almost never something that's going to stop you from doing what you wanted originally. Your visions change, your tools change, your ways adapt, it's how the world works, it's how we work. It's how everything has always been.

I agree that it depends on your use case. If you're an artist or illustrator you can make do with a number of alternatives and just go elsewhere for photo editing, and if you're just doing basic adjustments to photos rather than detailed edits you can figure it out as well.

Photohop is harder to bypass if you're a jack-of-all-trades user mostly doing image editing but also dabbling in the other options from time to time. That's not to say you can't do it if you try, but it's going to be less convenient and add friction to your workflow.