That’s likely because Gimp stopped being good years ago and has a barely a fraction of the capabilities of photoshop. Not because it’s free. It’s basically photoshop circa 2012.
I say this as an Adobe hater. I moved my department off premiere and into resolve. I can’t stand Adobe.
I was using a relatively old version of Photoshop around about 2016/2017 and back then at least I was so much happier using gimp, it felt easier and more intuitive even with what I considered to be the more advanced features. I'm guessing photoshop got a lot better then?