As a point of comparison, you may want to look through all the other merge requests that actually do get accepted, the majority of them do: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/merge_requests?sta...
The problem is that GTK was used as a generic toolkit, and they've added a bunch of weird customization's to make it work better with their platform. That fucked over a lot of people who used that toolkit on non-Gnome platforms, and for non-Gnome uses.
Most people using GTK didn't sign up to be part of the gnome platform. Firefox isn't a gnome app. They (and everyone else) assumed it was being developed as a generic and cross-platform gui toolkit. Bit of a bait and switch there.
The tight integration between gnome (the platform) and GTK (the cross-platform GUI toolkit) seems an awful lot like a betrayal, like taking something that was for everyone and well.. taking it. Making it all about themselves, and burning the commons so other people can't use it. Or at least like a heavy-handed attempt to force people to write Gnome apps instead of GTK apps.
But, since I've said this before, I'll say it again: If the other people who use the toolkit want to have input, they need to contribute more. AFAIK there are zero non-GNOME devs working full time on GTK. I hope that changes, i.e. I hope the other desktops can find funding to send more designers and developers to collaborate with the GNOME people so everyone can have their say. That is the real issue here, I think it's incorrect to suggest that anything was "taken." It's open source, there isn't anyone who's going to take the code away from you unless you blatantly violate the license.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/839
Also: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748672
The GTK devs were saying that they wanted a flag shared between nautilus and the file picker that would enable/disable typeahead. Unfortunately nautilus refuses to implement that flag, which I think means we're all still relying on forks for that feature.
So you're not really allowed to solve one without solving the other, last I checked.
So yeah, the issues is very much in both, and you can't solve the issue with GTK without solving it in Gnome.
The final comments from the developer directly contradicts this claim:
>I'd be happy to review a merge request that added the ability to disable recursive search in the file chooser using a GSettings option ... I was thinking more along the lines of having a key in the file chooser settings schema that would be observed by Nautilus.
The idea there is that the key should be in a standard location read by nautilus (or some other GTK file manager) if it also decides to implement that feature. Edit: I also should note that it appears there was not even initial consensus about this, the other GTK developer seemed to be skeptical at first.
systemd does have a very opinionated code style, but that's not much different from (say) Linux kernel.
If the professional designer in question really is expected to do something different, such as make usable software, then a review of job performance is sorely needed.