>>198076
It still is, by featureset and compositor performance, way ahead of 99% of desktop environments that exist.
Just because it has opinionated design choices doesn't get away from the fact that it's excellently written, high-quality code. And thats a great thing for free, libre software, because it's one of the only open-source graphical environments which can truly stand face to face with something proprietary like macOS's Aqua, which is currently light-years ahead of anything on Linux, but GNOME and KDE Plasma have catched up insanely fast in the past 3 years.