Consistent look is nice, but when talking about "native" UI, I really care about reliability and seamlessness.
Custom UIs tend to be crufty; slow-ish, sluggish, they don't quite integrate with OS conventions (right-clicks, C&P, tab, overflow behaviour, scaling, rendering quality, window resizing behaviour and so on). If a custom UI is none of those things, and not really ugly, I don't think I mind. For example, I never played a computer game and thought, nice game but why are the buttons so custom?
I think the "native look" requirement got further diluted in the last decade with the rise of so many new platforms. A while back, it was mostly Windows; Linux was less popular, and frequently TUI anyway, Mac was perhaps more niche. Java GUIs were a thing and not very well-received. But then at least these "platforms" came on with different, high-quality, "custom" UIs: Android, iOS, Electron (it has its own custom feel to it), generally web apps, and so on.
So I'm desensitised to native "look", but not native "behaviour".
Custom UIs tend to be crufty; slow-ish, sluggish, they don't quite integrate with OS conventions (right-clicks, C&P, tab, overflow behaviour, scaling, rendering quality, window resizing behaviour and so on). If a custom UI is none of those things, and not really ugly, I don't think I mind. For example, I never played a computer game and thought, nice game but why are the buttons so custom?
I think the "native look" requirement got further diluted in the last decade with the rise of so many new platforms. A while back, it was mostly Windows; Linux was less popular, and frequently TUI anyway, Mac was perhaps more niche. Java GUIs were a thing and not very well-received. But then at least these "platforms" came on with different, high-quality, "custom" UIs: Android, iOS, Electron (it has its own custom feel to it), generally web apps, and so on.
So I'm desensitised to native "look", but not native "behaviour".