All the bickering about what makes a 'real' gravel race just reminded me of Ash Sowman's two excellent documentaries about Jeffrey Herlings vs. Eli Tomac, and the differences in motocross in the European series and the US series where each treated the other series with some level of snootiness. Herlings rocked up to the US series and rather embarrassed the US series, winning races quite easily and even praising a course with multiple lines and easy overtaking opportunities that other racers had complained was too technical and made it too challenging to overtake - before Eli Tomac went and salvaged the reputation of the American series faster than anybody expected and restored a level of inter-series respect.
I suspect the UCI might be aiming at a sort of halfway house for the time being in the interest of having some recognisable names appearing, because with it being a new(ish) discipline, there aren't too many names known solely for gravel racing (if any at all), and those names that are recognised being the likes of retired road veterans or journeymen Conti pros and those that never really made it leads to many outside of the gravel scene to dismiss it unfairly, but also the exceptionalist attitude that it's only proper gravel racing if it directly clones the exact nature of the US races - down to the startlist - does no favours either. It needs more televising and better televising to be able to catch on to a wider audience, assuming this is the end goal. I'm sure it is for the UCI, at least, I'm not sure how widely that attitude is held across the gravel community though because I haven't really delved into it, but I wouldn't be surprised - given experiences with many other such communities - if there is an element within the fandom that kind of wants it to stay as their little corner of world cycling and don't really want to see riders from other disciplines come in and shatter that.
Maybe for the time being gravel does have a weakness in that the only riders it has with name value are journeymen or road also-rans, meaning that the active specialists are sort of dismissed as such too; but as long as the scene has such a reputation in terms of lax testing, you can't be surprised that the UCI designs its vision of gravel around those riders it already has in the testing pool and views as low risk.
For the moment, the gravel specialists who can actually contend against top pros are only going to come from places where gravel is more lucrative as a career move over a pro road contract at a Conti team, and for the time being that's a very restricted market. In time maybe this will turn into cycling's equivalent of the Ski Classics series, with the Loppet calendar where there are still significant numbers of veterans of the World Cup cross-country calendar who have migrated to the longer, flatter, open style of racing in the Ski Classics and being successful through their late 30s and early 40s - but there are also dedicated specialists who only race this kind of race and occasional moonlighting in endurance races or stage races at the international level, who make good money from their careers as Ski Classics competitors.
That's probably the long term ideal for gravel as a racing format I would anticipate, and what would probably be needed for it not to be seen as something of a novelty format.