I used Qt back in the day, pre-Nokia, when it was just QtWidgets for cross-platform (Linux/Windows/Mac) desktop apps. I just wanted a decent C++ library/API to create the GUI for a Linux app (real-time spectrogram). It was a great for this, although I was never a fan of MOC - I wish they had committed to a pure/native C++ design.

For me Qt lost it's way when Trolltech was acquired by Nokia, and the focus became mobile rather than desktop, with different UI requirements resulting in QML/QtQuick being added.

Maybe the earlier addition of QtScript (or even MOC!) was a foreshadowing of what was to come, but in any case what had been a great cross-platform desktop UI toolkit, and the primary C++ one for Linux (with GTK being more C focused) ended up orphaning it's desktop roots to focus on mobile instead, having become a sprawling mish-mash of languages, GUI component technologies and scripting.