It seems like the only real complaint this article addresses is that gtk (or other non-native toolkits) add a ~20mb dependency, and Windows didn't have a good package manager (since static compilation is preferred).

Frankly, this is a non issue. Windows users are used to this. It comes with the territory. Toolkits like GTK and Qt are full featured, densely documented, fast, look good, and work well in any OS.