I feel the same way when things I'm used to change. E.g. the switch from XD to Figma a few years ago felt unfamiliar at first and it slowed me down. Mainly because I had a lot of things stored in my head that turned out to be different. Now it's the other way around and I could never go back to working with XD. I was also pissed at apple when they updated the OS to use the new Liquid Glass design system, now everyone seems to love it and designers copy it (still not the biggest fan, but I can live with it now) 🙂.
I hope the new theme will grow on people. The simpler color scheme (compared to the original Uikit theme) and CSS variables make theming much easier. You can quite easiely customise it to your taste if you don't like the defaults. And it shares some concepts with AdminThemeCanvas like the fixed header and a more minimal modern aesthetic that fit very well for a web app like PW in my opnion. I am using the Konkat theme for all my new projects.
@diogo has already sent detailed documentation for the Konkat theme to Ryan, which he will hopefully publish on the site soon. The new docs are especially interesting for module developers. @maximus has also done a great job with the style system guide. I think that will also help demonstrate the benefits of the new theming system. The theme now also supports UIkit components out of the box. We will have to wait a bit for Ryan to decide where those docs will be published.
AdminTheme Canvas has served me well for many years, and I’m glad so many of you have used it! If anyone wants to take it over, feel free to send me a DM. But I think it’s better to use the core theme as a replacement.