We study a certain class of degenerations of Gushel–Mukai fourfolds as conic bundles, which we call tame degenerations and which are natural if one wants to prove that very general Gushel–Mukai fourfolds are irrational using the degeneration method due to Voisin, Colliot-Thélène–Pirutka, Totaro et al. However, we prove that no such tame degenerations exist.