Hello there.
Here are the problems in your pen that are responsible for it not working:
You are gettting an error in console - there is no such thing as SmoothScrollbar.init() - it is Scrollbar.init() instead; nothing related to GSAP.
Also, as far as i know, smooth-scrollbar does not have an 'effects' property; so that is probably redundant, too. I would suggest removing that to prevent any possible problems that might arise from that.
You don't have a layout/setup that would work with smooth-scrollbar to begin with; you'll need to apply proper CSS styling on the body and the container you're going to initialize smooth-scrollbar on for it to work; nothing GSAP related.
In CSS as well as in JS you are targetting elements with the class '.item' but you don't have any such elements in your HTML, you only have '.item-1', '.item-2' and '.item-3'; nothing GSAP related.
Your .item element has a height of 0 set via CSS. Although in a comment you say you're going to set its height via GSAP, you never do.
Again, less of a GSAP specific problem.
And finally:
You are not declaring a specified scroller element in your ScrollTrigger, which you will have to do, as smooth-scrollbar does not run on the body element. This one is something GSAP / ST specific;
For clarity, see the smooth-scrollbar example and documentation on
https://gsap.com/docs/v3/Plugins/ScrollTrigger/static.scrollerProxy()
Since a lot of your problems arise from not properly handling smooth-scrollbar in the first place, I would suggest having a thorough look at their documentation. Smooth-Scrollbar is not a GreenSock product, so you really shouldn't expect to get support for it in the GSAP forum.
I implemented the raw basics to the fork of your pen below - and it works as it should.
I give no guarantee that it is bullet proof with regard to smooth-scrollbar though; you should check on all that yourself.
https://idiotwu.github.io/smooth-scrollbar/
https://github.com/idiotWu/smooth-scrollbar
https://github.com/idiotWu/smooth-scrollbar/blob/develop/docs/api.md
Hope this will help get you going in the right direction though. Good luck!
https://codepen.io/akapowl/pen/KKERaYE