I love Kitty. I've used it since discovering it in about 2019 and it strikes the right balance of things.

It's easy to customise, super fast, light on resources, available in my distro's package manager and while the author might be a bit prickly at times, he does a fantastic job leading the project and keeping things focused.

I'll give the new shaders a try but the animated cursor is probably busy enough for me already.

When I used Kitty, I hacked in a shader that'd render a crude glow around the letters so that I could use more translucent backgrounds and still have readable text. I have no idea where that code is - I haven't used Kitty for years. But that's the kind of thing that'd be great to do with the shader support.