Devil's Devil's Advocate (God's Advocate?): his strictness, while perceived as some as aggressive/toxic, is the main reason why the Linux kernel code is high quality.
Contrast with many other open-source projects which allow the product to suffer rather than offending the contributors.
Yep, I remember comments like "You know Linux is good shit because Linus won't tolerate bad patches."
There was a "mailing list alpha male" culture back then which inspired a lot of people to join up. Maybe some people didn't like it, but in Linux's case, the cult of personality attracted a lot of followers.
Modern Linux dev is mostly a 8x5 job now, so that mercurial king stuff became really tired.
Contrast with many other open-source projects which allow the product to suffer rather than offending the contributors.