this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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None of what you stated makes sense. Most people are not using exclusively GNOME applications on GNOME, or exclusively KDE applications on KDE. Like with elementary OS, most people are running applications like Steam, Spotify, Discord, Zoom, Slack, etc. Plenty of people are using Qt and KDE applications on GNOME, or GTK and GNOME applications on KDE. You think no one uses Krita or Scribus on GNOME, or GIMP on KDE?
Thanks to Flatpak, you might even be running elementary applications on your system. Even Windows back in the late 90s and 2000s was full of desktop applications with custom proprietary interfaces. Nowadays everything's becoming a web view bundled with a Chromium runtime, and you're more worried about a COSMIC app ecosystem having a different UI from GTK?
COSMIC is a good thing because it's a standardized and open source cross-platform native desktop toolkit. People can create themes for it, and those themes can be bundled alongside GTK and Qt/KDE themes. Due to the nature of how Rust libraries are developed and linked, COSMIC applications are mostly statically-linked, which even makes it trivial to put them on a USB drive and bring them to any PC.
That's already not possible on GNOME because some GNOME applications hardcode their theme, others use libadwaita, some use GTK4 without libadwaita, some use GTK3, and there may still be a GTK2 app lingering around here and there in the repos (ie: GIMP).
Few people are going to care that there's a GTK application installed on their COSMIC desktop. COSMIC will automatically generate GTK3/4 themes to match the system theme. We may even automatically generate a libadwaita theme, so it will look "same enough".