> KDE is still extremely anal about not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft [...] only because it's Microsoft's.

And I thank them for it. Microsoft has zero regards for the FOSS community, and forcing people to use FOSS tooling made by the FOSS ecosystem to develop FOSS makes a lot of sense to me, at the very least for the dog-feeding argument, but also because it wouldn't make sense to use tooling from a for-profit company that tried time and time to eradicate your community. I understand the avoidance by developers who been around the space for two decades or more, because we remember what Microsoft has done.

Sometimes you have to bite the sour apple in order to actually stand for your ideals, and this particular choice seems like a no brainer, at least to me.

As I explained in response to other commenters, it wouldn't have to be vcpkg. Maybe I didn't articulate it best, but the inherent issue is not just Anti Microsoft stance, but more of not-invented-here paradigm. They go against the grain too much and it tangibly makes things worse for devs and users. They could have gone with other package manager instead on insisting on Craft. They hardly ever have any good arguments for it, feels like sunken cost fallacy all over.