Something has to be seriously wrong with the way it was compiled for gdb to have trouble. Debugging (or in-process exception dumps), which only does a reasonable number of backtraces, should always be able to use separate unwind
data sections.
Including frame pointers should only have a performance effect for sample-based profiling, which does a very large number of backtraces. And the general fact is - people don't profile, and if they do, they don't do it correctly.
Omitting frame pointers has significant performance wins on platforms with about 6 registers, like 32-bit intel x86. It's much less of a win on platforms with about 14 registers, like 64-bit x86 or 32-bit ARM, let alone platforms with about 30 registers, like 64-bit ARM.
Since modern architectures are strongly trending toward designs that support more registers, a frame pointer isn't unreasonable to choose. But that's still no excuse for all the shitty software that refuses to work correctly without them, rather than merely more slowly.
(Note that theoretically it is possible to design an ISA/ABI combo that supports easy and fast unwinding even without frame pointers, but there's always going to be some overhead and to my knowledge this choice hasn't been done.)