Well, the last big German spelling reform in 1996 also had been quite a culture war, where big newspapers resisted for a while, rejecting "Delfin" over "Delphin" or reducing usage of "ß" and using more "ss" depending on the previous vowel etc.
But over time most of the change have proven to be successful ...
And yes, the French "est" will remain for the time being, but for me as a student of French there would have been a lot of low hanging fruit.
But today the interesting thing to me is how modern communication changes this. Text messaging leads to a massive increase in "dialect writing" while at the same time auto correction (and more recently AI) counters that. Back in the days™ writing was mostly done by the elites (authors, news papers, authorities) and the private letter was well thought. But test messaging, online forums, ... lead to more text being generated by "average" public, which over time certainly impacts "professional" writing.
I think the fact that that reform was successful at all, even with resistance, is evidence that Germans have less of a nationalistic attachment to their language than French people do. Even the extremely common grammatical particle “daß” was changed (to “dass”) — it’s just impossible for me to imagine anything similar ever being accepted in France.
The thing is that reforms are not needed. Usually they are pushed under the argument of "simplification" by people who have arguably too much tome onbtheir hands but why is it needed and how far should you go?
It is not just spelling. There are periodic calls to simplify grammar for no other reason than apparently people get dumber and dumber over time and can't learn the language anymore so it should be simplified.
One example in France is reform to reduce the use of the subjunctive tense. For example, now when I read the news I see horrible stuff like "Après qu'ils ont" (instead of "Après qu'ils aient" [and btw "est" and "aient" are pronounced the same ;)]), which would have sent my primary school teacher into a rage. Why do that? Cynically just because the members of the Académie Française need to find something to do...