Imagine working in a professional setting, and your boss asks you to see your most recent sketch on a design. You open your .kra file and that mascot pops up. Your boss sees the splash screen and asks himself "who have I just hired?".
I know the splash screen can be disabled (but only via a flag on the executable), defaults still matter. If the mascot was purely used on the website or announcements/blog posts, it really would be a different deal. Now it's packaged in such a way that it distracts from other workflow and gets in your face. Setting a flag on the executable is also finicky way of handling this preference, and it's prone to breaking after updates.
Speaking of branding and icons, the krita icon itself [1] is actually quite nice, and in my opinion seems to send the same vibes of cutesy anime much more vaguely by their choice of mostly using pink/pastel colors, but still doesn't make a statement in the same blunt way the mascot does. They could use their icon as branding on the splash screen and I would be very satisfied.
1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Calligra...
