The author has a clarification, but even before reading that, I didn't think the author was mocking Linux at all, just the person who tried to use the Linux rep

The author has a clarification, but even before reading that, I didn't think the author was mocking Linux at all, just the person who tried to use the Linux repo has an example of a high-volume project. Linux itself is both better and more important than any repo on which I'm likely to ever work, but their centralized points of control mean that I've worked on multiple repos with a higher commit-rate. It's not a great example of stress-testing an SCM product.