This link is relevant for context. It's a small blog post from Steve McIntyre identifying the problems he sees with firmware in Debian and proposing solutions. Eventually McIntyre's views led to this general resolution.

Quoting from that link:

In my opinion, the way we deal with (non-free) firmware in Debian is a mess, and this is hurting many of our users daily. For a long time we've been pretending that supporting and including (non-free) firmware on Debian systems is not necessary. We don't want to have to provide (non-free) firmware to our users, and in an ideal world we wouldn't need to. However, it's very clearly no longer a sensible path when trying to support lots of common current hardware.

With his proposed solution being to

[...] split out the non-free firmware packages into a new non-free-firmware component in the archive, and allow a specific exception only to allow inclusion of those packages on our official media. We would then generate only one set of official media, including those non-free firmware packages.

So basically the same that was voted now, "Change SC for non-free firmware in installer, one installer".

In my humble opinion, as a literal nobody on the internet: sometimes you need to take a step back to take two forward. This inclusion looks undesirable but necessary, and I feel like giving differential treatment to non-free firmware vs. non-free software was the right move here, to minimise the ideological damage caused by promotion of non-free code.