My perception is that Adobe stuff is kind of like Oracle. Overweight, expensive, free/open alternatives do just as well in most cases but if you really need to fully exploit the feature set, and really need a big company support agreement, there is no substitute.
Also if you are a creative business, most anyone you would want to hire will know Adobe tools. Very few will be familiar with gimp, inkscape, or command-line utilities.
Twenty years worth of muscle memory and user presets is one hell of a moat even for replaceable software, but for example After Effects, Photoshop and InDesign have no credible alternatives.
FWIW I switched to Affinity from PS after having used PS for 20+ years (since 5.5 I think?). Honestly, it was super easy.
Most of the use I had for PS is now split between: Procreate (drawing, illustration, game assets), Figma/Penpot (wireframes, quick mockups, UI sketches etc...), Affinity (image processing, quick photo edits, batch processing, anything that doesn't fall into the categories mentioned earlier).
I used Sketch (and now increasingly Figma) for drawing rectangularish shapes and mockups, but for creating anything artistic Illustrator’s appeal is in the hundreds of effects you can create in seconds with combinations of advanced rotation/duplication/path-following/distortion/blur.
Have you tried Affinity Designer? I've used Illustrator for 10 (or maybe even 15?) years, for anything from illustration to UX design (before Figma, after Fireworks was sunsetted).
I haven’t, but all of your advocacy might make me try it now. If you happen to have some YouTube videos, playlists or tutorials you would recommend to get going feel free to share :)
And perhaps a combination of https://cavalry.scenegroup.co and https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion could be After Effects alternatives. I haven't made the switch yet due to the number of AE plugins I own, but perhaps this most recent Adobe gaffe will do it for me.