Offtopic: Stroke scaling in Inkscape

[Off-topic because the author's essential point is that interface elements can be arbitrarily complex in how they should respond to changes in size; here I address only the question of how to make stroke widths not scale.]

> In Inkscape dragging a handle scales the entire object (including changing the width of the lines), leaving it distorted. ... There are ways around that problem in Inkscape

The above wording suggests that the author might not be aware that one can switch between these two differently desirable behaviours for how stroke width responds to affine transforms (i.e. whether strokes keep their size as the author wants in this case, or whether they keep their proportion to the rest of the object, thus avoiding distortion when the stroke is considered part of the "shape"):

To the far right of Inkscape's Tool Controls bar near the top of the screen are four toggle buttons that control what things get scaled when scaling an object, the first of which has tooltip “When scaling objects, scale the stroke by the same proportion.”

If the window is too small for these to be visible, then there'll be a "downward triangle" (‘▾’) menu at the far right of the screen to hold these options and anything that didn't fit; in which case the option appears as “Scale stroke width”.

These buttons used to be more visible, simply because the window used to default to being large enough for them to be seen. That was a mixed blessing: sometimes people would toggle these these options and forget about it, and then later find the resulting behaviour annoying. There's something of a continuum here between stroke width (which could quite reasonably default to not being transformed) and gradients (which are almost always better to transform along with the rest of the object), with rounded rectangles and patterns being somewhere in between.