Gnome makes absolutely no promises of version compatibility for extensions.

You’re stuck waiting for an extension dev to update to support the new gnome version.

That server’s root access is now vulnerable to a compromise of the systems that have the private key.

An alternative, if you have console access, to doing that root password dance, is:

1. Drop to rescue/emergency/single-user mode.
2. Do your changes to the user account
3. Drop back to multiuser mode.

They my go to to quickly triage a problem being caused by SEL or not.