He's certainly not getting paid to make SDL work on Gnome, and I think does a pretty good job of explaining why the proposed solutions from Gnome will result in a poor user experience.
>This is also not true. GNOME has designs for tray icons in their GitLab repo.
Yeah, but every other wayland compositor seems to have gotten it to work already. This is what people mean when they talk about "splitting the linux ecosystem". If they're not able to manage the complexity of implementing stuff like tray icons, things that are really important for cross-platform apps, maybe they should pivot to using a library like wlroots.