I’ve always ignored Photopea because it’s completely proprietary and the pricing is predatory. I don’t approve of those models, the same reason I won’t touch Adobe.

I wish Affinity would just release linux versions, but I expect those to get worse now that they are owned by Serif.

I think your best bet is to buckle down, swallow your pride, and learn Gimp. Yeah, it’s a dumpster fire if you come from a Photoshop background because it isn’t trying to copy Photoshop, it wants to be its own thing. But even though it seems counterintuitive due to your years of existing programming, it is quite powerful.