Wow, I haven't used Anki since... before they switched to date-based releases, but the new version is a big step improvement from versions I have used previously. When I updated, opening the app for the first time opened the terminal for a text-based installer, which didn't inspire confidence, but it's well improved. (This isn't really related to the backend changes you're mentioning, but this comment inspired me to take another look at Anki.)

The PyQt GUI is still meh but overall it's much better (and nowadays much much faster). I think it's still unnecessary crufty and unfriendly in places. That being said I wrote both web and TUI front-ends and it can definitely be streamlined and cleaned up. Interestingly, stripped of the GUI, running core (with old db and profile) uses just ~15MB.