Labelling something as "toxic" likely implies "bad for the success of the ecosystem". So no, they are definitely not orthogonal. They are (presumably negatively

Labelling something as "toxic" likely implies "bad for the success of the ecosystem". So no, they are definitely not orthogonal. They are (presumably negatively) correlated. The point made was: seeing that the Linux project is pretty successful already, it's not "safe to assume" that these changes you envision would lead to either a good kernel or a healthy ecosystem. You seem to want to optimize for something else...?