A developer team can be insincere and avoid outrage by just leaving half-broken features in the software, stop testing them, and ignore all complaints about it. Low quality and inactivity doesn't make for as good a story on social media.
That is false, say I remove the feature X because reason A but I tell everyone that is for reason B. So I had the courage to remove X but I did not the courage to be sincere, maybe I am not sincere with myself and the real reason A is that the code was written by somebody else in the past and I want to implement new cool shit and not read somebody else code, but I can't admit that I don't care about feedback because I might be replaced as a project leader so I invent bullshit excuses like blame the previous developers that wrote bad code, blame the user that are using it wrong or invent some bullshit UX story with no real user tests to push my egotistic vision on everyone else because I am really an Apple fan but I could only get a job to work for RedHat
But I'll never accept client side decorations.
Courage is not intrinsically admirable. Whether it's admirable or abhorrent depends on the context of what you're doing. Ditto for sincerity.
The issue with GNOME is the insincerity of feature removal, things like "nobody uses that", "nobody needs that", "you are doing it wrong" instead of just be sincere , "file picker is a usefull feature but we can't or don't care to implement it" , "optional server side decoration is a good feature but our devs want to work on cool shit not backwards compatibility" ... if you are an open source dev, be sincere and people will not be disgusted by your community and you don't get the go to example for bad developers/community.