I would take anything that comes out of Ken Wheeler’s mouth with a grain of salt. From my point of view Ken is the Alistare Crowly of photography. His whole business is based around spewing toxic garbage about products as well as other people. It is quite disgusting tbh.
Don’t get me wrong I am a Mac user and also still feel quite stuck on Adobe Products mainly because Photoshop. My choice in computer most of the time feels like a massive limitation to open source due to constant issues I come across that are Mac specific.
I will say one thing Darktable once you learn your way around the complexities crushes Lightroom output. Gimp also is amazing despite lacking Adjustment layers is awesome too. My issue with Gimp mainly falls under getting plugins to work on Mac as well as my Wacom refusing to be recognized in the program due to a GTK2 Mac bug. Can’t wait for Gimp 3 tbh.
A lot of these Darktable sucks people just refuse to put in the time to learn how to use the application. 95% of the reviews I have seen are people who tried it for 30 mins at most if that long. I came across another video the one day where the person was complaining that Darktable unlike Lightroom destroyed color in the highlights of the image causing weird artifacts and such. Looked like he was trying to recover the highlights through cranking sliders Lightroom style and never actually tried other modes of Highlight recovery like color propagation.
I just wish people would stop blindly comparing tools without at least having somewhat equivalent knowledge with both. All it does is spread crap misinformation.