What you're quoting Linus on is his commentary about the patches landing in the past week, which is supposed to be only bug fixes as the code stabilizes enough

What you're quoting Linus on is his commentary about the patches landing in the past week, which is supposed to be only bug fixes as the code stabilizes enough for a stable release to be made. New features would lane weeks earlier during the merge window. What's newsworthy here is not anything that was merged recently, just the fact that this new functionality is now available from a stable release. If there was anything really significant from the past week's changelog, it would likely have been reason to delay the stable release for at least another week.