I fully agree that for many image editing tasks, GIMP as open source, non-proprietary. and free it is powerful for the image editing needs of most folks.
Most.
But as someone who has used Photoshop since the early 1990s, I cannot fully agree that X is as powerful as Y. Even with all my years of experience, I continually find capabilities I did not know.
Here is a very simple one. When you create animated GIFs, the way most tools work is they repeat the frame sometimes hundreds of times fior fluid motion, yet many frames aer exact duplicate. What I found long ago in the Photoshop timeline window I use for creating animations, it is the only tool I have seen (maybe there aer others) that lets my specify how long each frame is displayed, and to have different times per frame. This reduces the filesize and complexity but not repeating frames unnecessarily.
When I taught digital/web media eons ago for the open digital storyelling class DS106 we approached software/tools different from most courses, as we could not be sure what software students had access to.
So when we got to image editing or audio editing or video editing, we did not specify what tool students should use. If they had access to/experience with commercial software, they were welcome to use that. But we would also provide suggestions for other open source alternatives or web-based free editors (we had a collection of Tools of the Trade, these are really old circa 2012 so outdated).
This was truly freeing for us as teachers, we did not have to teach lessons on how to use software. The idea was for students to use our small set of suggested resources, research their own, and rely on the class/community for help. When they did media assignments, they not only were asked to write about and share what they created, but share also “how” they did it, where their ideas came from, and to write mini tutorials on methods.
It’s been a while since I used GIMP, it did a lot, but frankly using it was not easy out of the box.
Yeah Photopea has many great features for a web based editor, and I find that pixlr is also very powerful for multi-layered editing in a free web browser tool.
But unless you are someone like Arren who does high end media work, I don;t fully accept the X does everything Photoshop does suggestion- it does a lot, and I would encourage people w/o access to commercial tools to learn and use it.
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