QGIS has quickly grown into one of those “I can’t believe this is free” programs. 4.0 was a big step moving from QT5 to QT6. If you haven’t tried QGIS in like 10 years I highly recommend seeing if it meets your needs. As far as I can tell ESRI hasn’t done anything particularly evil yet but when I asked their reps what they are excited for in upcoming versions of ArcGIS all they had to tell me was my two least favorite letters. Just like any private company it’s only a matter of time before enshitification sets in so if for no other reason than to avoid single vendor lock in you should give QGIS a try today!
QGIS 4.0 is a big deal. The shift to Qt6 and Python 3 bindings is long overdue. Been using QGIS for mapping work for a decade and the 3.x releases were great, but this version finally moves past some of the legacy tech debt. The new rendering pipeline alone should speed up complex maps significantly.