Deployment is a little bit of a pain but they actually provide software to help - macdeployqt and windeployqt bundle everything up into a dmg or a zip.
You aren't forced to use QML. I kind of hate it and QtWidgets are much more mature - I just use those. Sure maybe they aren't being developed so much but they're still maintained. I don't think they'll go away for a long time.
Qt is great.