Not all people love Material design. The fact, that the Label became the main UI widget, is an unfortunate accident.

AFAIK Tk simply wrapped native widgets though? E.g. when the result was ugly, then that was because the platform's native UI framework was ugly.

It did not. It had/has its own widget set.

It didn't look ugly by early 90s standards (basically Motif look&feel) but didn't evolve.

It also always felt like a foreign body inside Python because Tcl was always still there along with it.