Mate-dock-applet does not conform to MATE panel customizations

Using debian trixie with MATE desktop, mate-dock-applet simply doesn't have its background change according to the panel it's on, simply using the opaque system theme color which sucks

the background of the applet itself *should* be transparent from how it's acting and the images in the github repo look fix, but it simply isn't working on my setup for some reason... is there a fix for this?