A lot of mate-themes (such as Green-Submarine) have something like the following:
vte-terminal {
background-color: white;
color: green;
}
This seems to no longer work on 1.28 (at least on Fedora).
The following does work:
@define-color text_view_bg white;
@define-color theme_text_color green;
(from here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/raw/master/src/vtegtk.cc)
Though I'm not sure if defining colors will break any other applications.