It makes a lot of sense if you think about it as optimising code readability for the case of seeing it through the lens of diff -pu -c 3 which is basically

It makes a lot of sense if you think about it as optimising code readability for the case of seeing it through the lens of diff -pu -c 3 which is basically what Linus does all day. This also implies that the argument has little meaning in the context of projects that aren't comparable in scale (both code size and contributor pool size).