I read over the ticket[0] and from what I could see it was mostly bickering about the format of the patch or something. I didn’t really see any “ba humbug, command line is all you need” kinds of posts from some graybeard.
So in short it looks more like an organizational problem than a technical or even political problem.
>Conway's law is an adage that states organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. It is named after the computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967. His original wording was:
>Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
>— Melvin E. Conway
In Gnome's case, the structure of its design is a copy of its disorganized communication structure.
So in short it looks more like an organizational problem than a technical or even political problem.
[0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233