Capt seemed to be blissfully unaware of the performance capabilities of his aircraft (or worse chose to ignore them ) and the First Office appeared unable to perform his primary task as "Pilot Monitoring" , that being to verbalise how screwed up the situation was becoming before it reached task saturation/quasi-dangerous levels
I think it's easy to say "they should, you shouldn't"
When your're catching up on your flightpath, as it's an uncommon situation and as we are not used to calculate path like this everyday, you can't tell immediately and definitely, "it ain't gonna work".
So basically, when I'm too high, I can't tell if it's going to work, I know it, I descent a quick as I can, and I have a fixed threshold at which I have to be either configured (1000' gear and flaps or 500' stabilised) either I go around.
I've done 20000' / 30Nm stabilized at 2000'. No big deal on that day. On another day, another wind, another weight, it couldn't have worked.
I admit it's not a bad approach, they should have gone around at 1000' or a the very last 500'. But they did go around.