No. Do you have a screenshot? I am intrigued.
They are just visual noise..
I do find a lot of decoration is just a pain in the arse, generally turning off animations, and transparency, choosing plain black background not images, selecting large readable text in high contrast colours and so on.
I did rather like the Winphone UI of big clear icons, and would prefer them on SF over the fiddly little ones it has.
I’ve never found QT to be all that pleasant to work with.
I don’t think the theming (“ambience”) is requiring QT. I think the UI is mostly QML (rather than QT/C++). This makes it editable text, rather than compiled blobs. @Seven.of.nine , a self proclaimed non-programmer, is keeping herself off the streets by puddling around in the QML files.
I’ve been a Unix developer for 45 years. So yeah I know what can be done.
If you are not someone who is OK with the many compromises that come along with a totally side-stream phone, you should stick to Android, or one of the many forks, and be happy.
While you can teach an old dog new tricks, he is seldom happy to be performing them.