Good theory, but it's factually wrong. "Maintainers" in this context doesn't refer to Linus personally, it refers to individual maintainers of parts of the kern

Good theory, but it's factually wrong. "Maintainers" in this context doesn't refer to Linus personally, it refers to individual maintainers of parts of the kernel. You can check the kernel MAINTAINERS file, and note that such a file has been there for years. There has been a longstanding problem of people submitting low-quality patches to maintainers - not to Linus personally - and that problem predated Linus stepping back for one release. Linus was not ousted and continues to have nearly absolute control; he has, for decades, chosen to exercise that control by delegating ownership of parts of the code to other people. Those people receive and review patches and incorporate them into their repos, which Linus pulls in bulk. (This is the origin of the term "pull request," which predates GitHub's use of it.) He quickly reviews those patches to make sure there's nothing weird, but he generally trusts that his "lieutenants" are making good decisions. That means that the time being wasted here is the time of individual maintainers, who are reviewing the patch, making a full judgment on it, and pulling it into their tree. Linus sees all such cleanups once per cycle and looks at them fairly quickly. Almost all of those maintainers have been "normal employees" of various companies for many, many years. Again, take a look at the MAINTAINERS file.