Learn how to update your QGIS styles as XML files when new versions or features are released in six easy steps.

The QGSformat is an XML format for storing QGIS projects.\nThe QGZformat is a compressed (zip) archive containing a\nQGS file and a QGD file.\nThe QGDfile is the associated sqlite database of the qgis ...

Prior (working in 3.28.6), QGIS was able to load these .xml files by creating a secondary .gfs file if not existing. Only if these .gfs files exist, it is still possible to load them with 3.28.9.