EDIT: Please state where in the legalese of the CC-BY-SA license that such would be disallowed.
Probably dissimilar in what way? I see them as legally similar. The only difference I see is GPL says 'this License" where CC-BY-SA says 'same or similar license.' GPL looks similar, ergo, GPL is fine.
This is not to say that literary works should be distributed under the GPL- the GPL is intended for computer programs. Perhaps the creator of this repository misunderstands this. Perhaps the repo contains computer code that performs the transformation and his intent is to place the computer code under GPL.
Regardless of these other issues, I still do not see a fundamental difference that prevents a derivative of a CC-BY-SA work being placed under GPL.
The FSF also thinks they're incompatible: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html