If the GNOME project were a corporation with non-technical management and a PR department, some higher-up would have ordered the devs to just add server-side decorations to Mutter already, regardless of how it complicates the code or compromises their design vision, to fix the bad PR. Of course, at least one such corporation, Red Hat, is already funding a lot of the development on GNOME. Maybe the Red Hat higher-ups are giving their desktop developers too much autonomy.

I've read the thread. I think the GNOME developers have logical reasons for their position. But it still makes them look bad, particularly since every other Wayland compositor supports SSD.