Blender is an amazing example if what happens when you don't waste your money.
This is the opposite to for e.g Mozilla which is very corporate, abandons projects (FirefoxOS, Servo, Pathfinder, etc.), funds completely unrelated projects, fire their engineering team to increase the boss salary and hire even more manager coming from Big Tech or elsewhere who never worked on (or cared) about Firefox
On a more positive note, I think we're going to see something similar to Blender with Godot Engine. They only have 15k/month and the progress is very fast
Also the community plays a very big role promoting Blender and pushing the development. We can see that with Geometry Nodes. The adoption in the community has been really great and also helped iterating and improving the system.
There is photopea.com that should cover needs of most people and affinity photo for more advanced photo production. Not free but single purchase somewhat reasonably priced at $40. Its very user friendly but not too limited at the same time. I like it.
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Krita is rather to be compared with Clip Studio, They stated it themselves in their blog in august:
https://krita.org/en/item/what-the-krita-developers-are-up-t...
I suppose it just depends on what you need in an image editor but in my opinion GIMP has been dead in the water for well over a decade at this point.
Krita on the other hand has a pretty rich feature set and seems to be more actively developed - I just wish it were more performant and a bit less quirky, interface-wise. I still use it on a regular basis though.
