sure, you might be able to do more transactions with an increased block size, but I personally feel the negatives are not worth it. Regardless, having the ability to do things off the main bitcoin chain is a good thing.
Even more so "cripple Bitcoin" it the wrong way of phrasing something that
a) currently how things are
b) intensely disputed in the community
The Bitcoin Core developers are incapable of coercing other users into not applying non-Bitcoin-compatible 8 GB block size limit rules. Also they don't want to apply that patch themselves, anyway, since they believe it is incompatible with what they understand to their best knowledge to be the goals and properties of Bitcoin. (Thankfully their goals also include lots of adoption, and they seem to have some proposals for how to achieve this even in the absence of 8 GB block sizes.)
Linux is not a decentralized distributed consensus rule system, so unfortunately I don't think the comparison is useful.