It’s not up to GNOME to do others work for them. If Mint wants a specific styling for their desktop, they should fork it (which they’re already doing) since everything is open source. It’s not like GNOME is gonna hunt them down for forking and creating a new product altogether lmfao. Cut the crap.
I think the topic of LibAdwaita was discussed plenty when shit hit the fan 2-3 years ago. Downstream developers can’t act all innocent and misinformed now when there was a huge drama between Budgie and GNOME upon LibAdwaita’s announcement.
GNOME developers repeatedly asked downstream developers to stop theming their apps which was generating endless bug reports for issues not caused by upstream code and none of them bothered to listen to them or work with them on a fix. Their choice of developing their own widget kit is a wise one because they’d otherwise still be wasting valuable developer time on fixing issues they should not be responsible for.
When one doesn’t take “no” for an answer, you’d have to forcibly make them stop. Just my two cents 🤷🏻♂️