That's not what's happening in this report. This is answering the question of whether an all-encompassing metapackage should prefer to match upstream or integrate more with Debian's philosophy. "Upstream only tests with NM and only supports NM for some features" vs "if it's not a hard runtime dependency, it's a Recommends or Suggests, not a Depends." It's packaging trivia. Decade-old-plus packaging trivia for a single distro. You can install gnome-calculator without any of the rest of the GNOME shell so this is a horrifically disingenuous comment you've got here.

No, just actually represent the situation accurately in what's supposed to be a good-faith discussion. Maybe provide any evidence of the claim you're making. It'd be appreciated.