On the other hand, do you want to be the one who says, "As a rule we follow the index, but this time we decided to break our own rule, and as a result we lost X% of returns"?
Better wrong with everybody else than wrong on my own.
Changing one of those features undermines the reasons for including the index. Doing it specifically for the purpose of including a firm where large pension funds have also been extraordinarily critical of the governance structure as a particular source of risk [0] even moreso.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/new-york-california...
Having said that I guess you have a valid point. Once major institutional investors decide an index has basically gone corrupted, then they won't actually buy the index fund anymore. They will just buy all the stocks in the index, and underweight the parts they think are tainted. That's what I would do, anyways.