I think that you're on to something here.

I write C full time, and have done so for many years. It didn't occur to me that the pointer to a pointer aspect was the source of any of the confusion until just now. Actually, I don't think that I consciously registered its presence when I read the code. There is only one interpretation of the code that makes any sense, and that's at least easy for an expert to see quickly.

I am sure that people that think that the terser variant is overly clever don't get it. To be fair, it's hard to generalize from this one example. But I think that I know exactly what Torvalds intended to draw attention to.