If you think you can do better you're welcome to do better. I say this without a hint of sarcasm. This is how open source works. It's a do–ocracy, not a democracy. Whoever makes a telnet server gets to decide how the telnet server works and how much testing it gets before release.
Maybe the lesson here is to stop letting the GNU folks do things, if this is what they do. This is only one example of craziness coming out of the GNU camp.
Or, flip the responsibility to what it has always been understood to be, when using open source software from random volunteers (some being bad actors) on the internet for anything remotely critical: audit the source.
GNU doesn’t provide labor, only organizational tools like mailing lists and whatnot. The projects that GNU supports are still run by individual volunteers. If you want it done better then please volunteer so that you can be the one doing it better.