Losing development momentum for a beancounting reason like this one is a sure way to kill a project. It works every time. Once development is halted, it is very difficult to pick it back up.
Python isn't a side project to yolo on. Updating the GC without a PEP caused massive issues for actual people using Python. If you want to impact software used by millions of developers then you better be willing to handle a bit of process.
Killing the incremental GC for synthetic benchmarks, not real ones, caused the issues. If the processes are broken and you get nothing done with it, you better step aside and do it without. Fork it, and drive the blockers away.
What does "beancounting" mean here? I don't see anything about money or budgets in the announcement. Are you referring to their concerns about the maintainability and complexity of the codebase?