From what I shallowly researched; GCM's nonce seems limited to 12 bytes by convention only. That nonce reuse is so fatal seems absurd to me.

Would "salting" the key safely tackle the problem?

Put explicitly;

  send <- nonce || salt || ciphertext
  recv -> decrypt(ciphertext, nonce, pbkdf(pass) || salt)

[edit: apply salt outside of the kdf]