Yeah that’s basically the reason. That method is a backdoor to get platform-independent screenshot export functionality working, it’s not really intended for general use.
There’s a note that the image has to be in the RGBA8 format:
Perhaps a better approach would have been to fallback to ImageRaster, which allows reading color data from any jME image, in case a format other than RGBA8 is used. You can implement a PR for that if you like