Wow, that is some unexpected news. I guess, they were always quite opinionated and their whole shtick was "GTK bad", so with Noctalia still being Qt-based and them still using KDE applications, they do still stick to that principle.

Well, and I do have to say, when I tried KaOS before, it just felt like a more restricted version of most other KDE distributions. You'd need a very specific brand of masochism to find that preferrable. With that Niri+Noctalia desktop, they have a unique selling point beyond being restrictive, so I guess, godspeed to them.