This is why ousting Linus puts the long-term health of the kernel at risk. It’s very difficult and expensive, at a personal and professional level, to tell colleagues to “fuck off” if they are submitting low quality garbage for reasons related to their salary. Linux was Linus’s baby, he had nearly absolute control, and he didn’t care too much about politeness - this was a magic recipe for him to be able to stave off garbage patch requests from motivated corporate peons.

Now, if the people approving patches are just normal employees who can get fired if a kernel sponsor complains enough, it’s going to be much harder for them to successfully deflect all the bullshit without ever caving in.