Gimp makes progress, but Krita and Darktable get it right.
GIMP 2.10.6 introduces vertical text layers and comes with improved performance. Recently, the GNOME foundation received a 400,000 $ donation and they sent a quarter of that money to GIMP. Hopefully this financial support will help to finally make GIMP useable in a productive environment. Currently, color management is still broken. But the space invasion project made the underlying General Graphical Library (GEGL) fully color-managed and the developers of GIMP try to make use of this and make GIMP fully color managed, too. This development takes place in the GIMP 2.99 development version (git master branch of GNOME/gimp). For the time being, stick to the second big open-source image manipulation software, Krita, whenever possible (the text tool needs to be overhauled). Krita 4.11 has support for Python 3 scripting, vector, filter, group, and file layers. You can nondestructively work on layers with masks. Krita supports full color management through LCMS for ICC and OpenColor IO for EXR and comes with a wide variety of icc working space profiles for every need,
with a color space browser to visualise and explore them. HDR and scene-referred images and it has OCIO and OpenEXR support. For radiometrically correct processing of images in RAW or TIF format involving only level adjustment and cropping, Darktable is the software of choice.