What am I missing here?

> And the GR ruled that DDs can pretty much do whatever they want to Debian.

No, the GR ruled that the existing development process is working well enough. Basically: it'll be worked out in bugreports and so on. If it really doesn't work out, there's still the CTTE. It's a pretty slow process (endless discussions) but eventually a decision is made. Seeing every little detail and discussing options at length is expected IMO. It's not something I'd enjoy participating in (I like endless discussions, but not if I am actually trying to achieve something :-P), but it does result in a very stable and well working distribution.

One of the most important parts of the Debian constitution is that package maintainers cannot be forced to do work. You can't have a volunteer project where you require a maintainer to do some work they may not want to do, particularly when the problem originates upstream.

The entire Debian project would be destroyed by any requirement that went back on that basic premise from the constitution because you can't force volunteers to do work. The people complaining about this seem to miss this simple point.

It's no different that trying to pass a law in America that makes freedom of speech or religion no longer free. This would violate the basic premise of the USA constitution and there is a process for the courts to overrule it and declare such a law invalid and unenforceable. In Debian AFAIK there is no "supreme court" that ensures that resolutions comply with the Constitution. Fortunately the Debian maintainers voted overwhelmingly in favor of allowing the maintainers to do what they want just as the Constitution says.

Any resolution to the contrary likely would have unwound the entire Debian Project as maintainers began to quit after being forced to do work they did not want to do. It wouldn't take much or even very many people to quit to basically destroy the entire project. Regardless of how you feel about systemd there is no reason whatsoever to burn the entire Debian project down over it, unfortunately there are some that apparently disagree.