Karpeles and the rest of the committee in 1954 did a pretty good job.
That is one point of view. But. To accept it you also have to accept that most "commercial Folk Groups" such as the Dublin city Ramblers,Dubliners, strawbs etc largely sang synthetic folk and were traitors to the cause.
In a nut shell they were Folk singers that largely did not sing folk.

Nobody was being a traitor. Those groups made it absolutely clear what they were doing. When they started out, my paradigm of folk music was what Jean Ritchie did, and I didn't need to look past the album cover to see that they weren't doing anything like that, or anything I was very interested in.