Title is "Writing GUI apps for windows is painful", and then the author slaps on a bunch of bullshit constraints but pretends to be covering the general case. Sorry dude, if you want to do that then change the title to something appropriate like "Writing small, custom styled GUI apps for windows is painful". Otherwise this is bait and switch.

Implicit (for me anyway) in the title is that you are talking about vanilla GUI apps. Writing vanilla Windows GUI Apps is trivial and there are a bunch of tools that handle this extremely well. The article covers many of them but chooses to disqualify them for reasons.

Then we have ImGui as the tool of choice, but now this is qualified as only for "simple apps". Really? After all the fuss about constraints not being met? A bit of cognitive dissonance here I think.

More complex functionality things can get difficult but often even these are handled depending on the tools.

For vanilla dev the clear winner in terms of productivity has to be WinForms. Or if you can live with the clunky IDE - Lazarus. (You're allowed to replace with your own favorites.)

The real challenge is not writing GUI apps for windows, but rather is in writing cross platform apps.