Or it's not in vengeance, but caution after the researchers have demonstrated that they put their needs above the community's. When the presumption of innocence is lost, it's appropriate to revert the patches until they are known to be good.
ETA: GKH on reverting the patches[1]
> This patchset has the "easy" reverts, there are 68 remaining ones that need to be manually reviewed. Some of them are not able to be reverted as they already have been reverted, or fixed up with follow-on patches as they were determined to be invalid. Proof that these submissions were almost universally wrong.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210421130105.1226686-1-gregkh...