Something that confuses me a bit:
Ayatana-settings on UM 25.05 is compiled against GTK4
although GTK4 does not support Ayatana.
I can't wrap my mind around that choice. Anyone ? 
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Well, provided that indicators' configuration is stored in files, gui for editing configuration settings can be written for any gtk flavour, can't it?
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Yes ofcourse, but think about this:
People who use GTK4 can't use Ayatana so they are definitely not the target audience, not one of them will use it because its useless for them.
People who use Ayatana (KDE/MATE/XFCE etc.) are definitely not using a GTK4 environment and are thus confronted with the unsupported unthemable UX-problematic crap that is GTK4 for non-GTK4 environments thus doing so is really really strange. 
Therefore it would be much more logical to use GTK3 or even Qt which support ayatana users much better.
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BTW, at my UM 24.04 as ayatana application as ayatana settings depends on gtk3.
At the same time github says that ayatana application depends on gtk3 and ayatana settings depends on gtk4.
Finally, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy"
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Yes, on my 24.04 installs too.
But on 25.04 (that I installed on my stinkpad T420) they switched to GTK4.
A highly remarkable but very counterintuitive choice
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Yes indeed, a totally facepalming choice 
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As an analogy:
It's like a flashy pink, "hello-kitty" themed assault-rifle.
(no soldier would use pink, no child is supposed to use an assault rifle)
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What are the alternatives to ayatana? It seems to be going a bit off the rails.
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Always keep in mind ... if you can imagine it ... very likely ... somebody has already done it!
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There are not really alternatives to ayatana because all desktops agreed to ditch their homebrew indicators for a common standard which is ayatana. Ayatana has become part of the free desktop standard.
Ofcourse now, after the fact, GNOME is sabotaging it because of their malignant narcissitic "my way or the highway" attitude (or to be precise: "no way or the gnome way").
A better question would be "What are the alternatives to GTK4/Adwaita ? Because they are the ones that are going off the rails"
There could be a workaround for these GTK4 crap-apps. Create a hidden workspace that you can show or hide with a button where you can park all GTK4/Ayatana crap that refuse to support standards (wow, it is almost as if we are talking about Microsoft here) that will keep them out of the way.
It is ofcourse a terribly ugly hack so the best way is to ditch all GTK4 and use Qt alternatives.
Also, several applications already ditched GTK in favour of Qt (Audacious for instance) because of Gnome shenenigans.
The moment that this Gnome idiocy taint MATE beyond salvation I'm off to KDE. Either Ubuntu-Studio or Garuda-Linux. LXQT could also be an option.
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What's very weird about this is that it involved a complete re-write, apropos of nothing; replacing the language upon which the program was built, and it was bundled up in one commit in a PR submitted by a GitHub account that has since been deleted.
https://github.com/AyatanaIndicators/ayatana-settings/pull/25
The only review comment was "LGTM". And done.
Wild.
Similarly, Ayatana IDO is being re-written in GTK4 (Ayatana IDO provides custom GTK menu widgets for Ayatana System Indicators). Don't know what the rationale is.
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Good find!! I read your reaction to it 
That smells incredibly fishy.
Such a pullrequest has zero value for GNOME while it hurts the rest.
It is either bad intentions or GNOME is suddenly working on incorporating Ayatana-indicators after some backlash from the freedesktop.org community.
However, a 3rd possibility comes to mind.
Could it be that only Ubuntu® wants GNOME with Ayatana support and therefore pushed this pullrequest ?
That would be not very nice to all it's flavours. They could then at least have chosen to make it a separate version.
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Hi everyone!
I don't really know much about this but, so far, the most relevant information I was able to find is the following issue, submitted in the year 2021, in the "libayatana-appindicator-glib" GitHub project / repository (of "Ayatana Indicators"), that proposes to "Introduce support for GTK 4" (the discussion that is taking place in that issue seems to provide some context / additional information):
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TNX for the update
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