I think a better frame would be «how could the maintainers have responded in a constructive, collaborative way upon learning about the tooling not being compliant with Emacs-standards, in a way which have helped land what was clearly a good faith effort aiming to make Emacs better?»

Outright rejecting the patches was IMO not a pragmatic or constructive choice and will drive the wrong incentives wether you morally approve of it or not.