Seeing some of the mailing list threads about this gives me anxiety. If you thought your PR review process was painful, try reading through some of the nitpicks, useless feedback, and tangents Kent has fought through. You can find it on lore, I'm not going to link directly to anything specific.
As an outsider, there seems to be too many egos to placate when it comes to contributing to Linux.
I don't think that explains it, there is a structure (various levels of mainteners) and mainteners aren't outright malicious.
Theoretically there is also a CoC.
The problem's more that you're going to have strong conflicts of opinions that you can't hash out face to face between people who are already overworked and under stress
It's hard for devs, but you also have people quitting because the maintener position is not just thankless, but fucking thankless.
It is not as simple as reviewers abusing developpers because of a lack of structure. A large part of the kernel is under resourced, lacking mainteners, and that is stressful for everyone
AFAIR this was post by Hector Martin but he didn't mention anything specific. He was mostly venting out his flustrations around review process. I tried to find any of those messages but mastodon search looks broken or I have no idea how properly search for specific user posts.
Not fixing everything in Linux is not the same as not upstreaming. Martin seems to want to upstream the code for the drivers but not touch anything else. Which is totally fair!
I don't think that's fair. He does touch other things to improve interfaces sometimes. I see this not as "not touch anything else", but rather "not touch everything else".
As an outsider, there seems to be too many egos to placate when it comes to contributing to Linux.