This may be someone’s first submission and they may consequently not be aware of style guides, tools which can help lint, etc?
Also, given the amount of patches I have to read, uniform style really does matter. Unconventional style breaks the flow and detracts from the important bits.
Also, I'm not aware of a lint like tool that works on diffs. Many of the patches never get further than my MUA.
Personally I prefer to be less strict about style whenever possible, but then I prefer to work in safer languages, and I don't have the same firehose to deal with.
I didn't see any discussion about tradeoffs, alternative approaches, or a survey of what other systems do for this kind of functionality, or detailed benchmark results.
The tone was roughly what I'd want people to give me in a code review -- the only problem is that it was trivial, and could have been summarized as "Fix the style, check it with $tool"
That review also had a comment about an implicit limit on the number of objects, which is caused by a limit on the amount of physically contiguous memory the kernel memory allocator can obtain at once, and a comment that the code being reviewed would allow for a large increase of the reference count of a couple of important structures. Both appear to be very technical comments to me.