Depending on what it is you’re trying to make, it can actually be helpful as one of many components to help get your feet wet. The same way modding games can be a path to learning a lot by fiddling with something that’s complete, getting suggestions from an LLM that’s been trained on a bunch of relevant tutorials can give you enough context to get started. It will definitely hallucinate, and figuring out when it’s full of shit is part of the exercise.
It’s like mid-way between rote following tutorials, modding, and asking for help in support channels. It isn’t as rigid as the available tutorials, and though it’s prone to hallucination and not as knowledgeable as support channel regulars, it’s also a lot more patient in many cases and doesn’t have its own life that it needs to go live.
Decent learning tool if you’re ready to check what it’s doing step by step, look for inefficiencies and mistakes, and not blindly believe everything it says. Just copying and pasting while learning nothing and assuming it’ll work, though? That’s not going to go well at all.
GIMP is honestly fantastic. My workflow goes draw in GIMP, import to Inkscape to convert pieces to vector, then bring them into Godot where shaders get applied. I would rather draw in GIMP than any other program. I find drawing in Inkscape super awkward in comparison. GIMP is pretty no-frills, but it does the job. I prefer it over Photoshop. With Darktsble I’ve found it useful for importing high res raw images for textures too.
I don’t know why people hate on it so much. It’s all about using the tools you’re comfortable with.