That's not subjective. When they merge code like that and then you disappear, they're now stuck budgeting time to maintain that API for years. They can't be expected to do that work when no maintainers care enough and no GNOME apps are even going to use that API (Status icons were removed from the GNOME HIG years ago)

If you don't want to go through the trouble of becoming a committed long-term GTK maintainer yourself just to get this in, why not maintain that particular feature as a separate library?