Ok, when I merge coplanar faces, it seems to work fine.
Thing is, I don’t want to merge coplanar faces. I need quad geometry for my roads and this command erases the edges that I need.
Perhaps I could backup them and copy to the exploded group, but seriously - do I have to do this in order to perform such a basic operation? I would rather expect SketchUp Team to find me a clean solution with no extra trouble required.
PS This is what SketchUp said after merging coplanar faces. Same errors occur no matter how much I upscale the group.