There is more context and a link to the previous discussions started about a year ago about the issue in the commit introducing nativeCheckInputs: nativeCheckInputs by symphorien · Pull Request #206742 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
nativeCheckInputs are also documented in the manual: Nixpkgs 24.05 manual | Nix & NixOS and in the release notes NixOS 24.05 manual | Nix & NixOS
I’m also adding more high level documentation currently: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/213403
I’m intentionally not paraphrasing it here; if you don’t find it clear enough please let me know and maybe we can improve it.
Regarding discussions, besides the issue/PRs (it’s the second attempt), I asked for opinions/oppositions several times on the nixos dev matrix channel. Surprisingly there were very few objections.