Not telling someone something isn’t gaslighting. That’s a very different thing.
And you are making the mistake of assuming that other people think like you, have the same preferences as you, also have memories on an at least subconscious level, …
There are just so many factors, that depend on the person and this is one of those cases where extrapolating from your own lived experience is not the right way to do things. Like: I’m trans and you can trust me, that I have my own places, where I know that I can’t apply my standards to other people (“what do you mean, people don’t like the effects of cross-sex hormones?”).
There has to be a meaningful number of companies where each individually is spending more on adobe licenses than it would cost them to pay a bunch of developers to get gimp to the point where it is a fully sufficient alternative. But hey, the only thing more important to capitalists than making profit seems to be, to not go for cheaper FLOSS options, rather than spending pointlessly large amounts of money on proprietary software…