Ah yes, comparing shit to shit. Although there's basically no other choice anymore...

Anyways, I once tried removing the profile pictures in Dino. That's it. Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. After poking around, found that GTK literally has devtools like a web browser, albeit a bit more annoying to use. Found that there's is a "hidden" checkbox, if I check that it hides all profile pictures. Great, I thought. Then tried CSS:

display: none !important; // nah, that would be too naive
hidden: 1; // nope
opacity: 0; // doesn't remove from layout
width: 0px; // nope

Gave up, found the relevant docs after going through a bunch of useless ones, and all of the rules fit on one page. None of them remove a fucking element. And that's because none of these are meant for the user (have you met the average Gn*me user?). And basically all of them have native counterparts anyway, so they are just an illusion of choice to the developers, too.

WDYM Libadwaita is not customizable? Libadwaita is the most customizable UI lib I would say. You literally can just change every part of any app through css and call it a day.

I haven't tried doing it in a while, but I remember it being very difficult to change themes beyond tint and colors, with lots of apps having custom colors not in the pallet used in the "gtk.css" file.