Clive, I agree with your assessment.
When I read the call for submissions, I lost all interest after briefly considering the odds that poems like
the Society of Classical Poets' nauseating apotheosis of the paragon of law and order who kept his knee on George Floyd's neck* might appear next to mine if I submitted. I assumed that the assessment of that risk by poets I deeply admire would vary (particularly if they were more familiar with the editor than I was), but personally I wasn't willing to take the chance, and wanted no part of it.
I'm glad that these Sphereans' work will be reaching a wider audience, and I hope--no, I'm confident!--that their work's inclusion will improve the general taste of people who might be looking at form first and effect second. Hooray for contemporary language! Hooray! (Gotta say, though, I relish the idea of some rule-following curmudgeon being impressed enough by the above-listed Sphereans in that anthology to look up their other work, only to be shocked at their unrepentant heathendom when it comes to occasional use of near-rhyme, metrical substitutions, etc. Almost as if they think that
the rules themselves are not the most interesting aspect of formal poetry....)
* Looking at that poem again, I see that a minor metrical substitution would have disqualified that particular example. But when I think of "Extreme Formal Poetry," that's exactly the sort of thing that comes to mind. I hope the anthology proves me utterly wrong.