That seems arrogant. I imagine more thought & care went into git than you can fathom.
if "the issue at hand" is the more typical modern work environment for devleopers, then no, I don't think he has much special insight. Indeed, the fact that he's wrangling something so large and important means he's unlikely to have the time and attention to devote a lot of thought to how best to serve a pretty different group of people.
An obvious consequence of this is git's terrible interface. Its premise is "if you totally understand what Git is up to under the hood, the interface is great!" Fine for a small in-group of kernel developers whose lives are distributed patch sets, but terrible for the average developer. It has taken 15 years to get some reasonably named commands for common things like "restore a file". That's a great sign that we shouldn't listen to Torvalds on topics outside the realm of his admittedly impressive expertise.
Linux is, very intentionally, a piece of software which does not have "easy to understand for non-experts" in its design goals. You generally interface through Linux with system call wrappers provided by a libc (or another specialist library for other interfaces like libfuse or libnetfilter or whatever), not directly. Linus is, quite obviously, good at many things; it's silly to assume that means he's an expert at everything.
Linus developed Git as a low-level tool. Linus put a lot of thought and care into getting the implementation details right, but intentionally did not build an easy-to-use interface. The Git command line that people use today ultimately derives from Cogito, a toolkit written by someone not Linus that sat on top of Git. Eventually Git (which Linus had long since handed off to someone else) adopted most of the conventions of Cogito and created a "porcelain"/"plumbing" split. If you think it was arrogant to develop Cogito, I suspect you disagree with Linus.
Finally, Linus develops Linux with a very particular model, with e-mail-based patch reviews, merges from subsystem maintainers, etc. Most projects (even most open-source projects, but certainly almost all proprietary projects) do not work this way. The Linux kernel does not use a GitHub-style workflow for development, which is by far the most common way people outside the kernel community use Git. It may well be the case that a lot of thought was put into making Git work really well for Linus's use case but it does not match how other people do development.
It has no impact on the underlying concepts that make git scale well, cover 100% and 100% remote cases equally well, and provide deep under-the-hood concepts that can be deployed in exceptional circumstances.
The conversation is about the user experience of using Git - its CLI design, etc. It is entirely about "merely" what commands are being used. TFA is about new Git commands, not about any changed internals. Or, in the case of Sourcetree, it's about not using any of "Linus's" interface to Git (which, again, wasn't written by Linus) but interacting with the same Git internals.
If you have never done this before, and have only ever used git via the ST interface, switching to the CLI to get this done is going to be quite a shock. Maybe that's OK because realistically such tasks should be rare. But sometimes they are a critical task in development, and finding that the entire dev team is completely intimidated by it can be an issue.
It's much better than Subversion that was the standard before git arrived.
And it's much better than Mercurial that was competing to become the source control system to replace SVN.
Pull Requests were never going to happen with Mercurial and it's also not possible to delete a branch without some black magic server-side.
And with Git hopefully it will be possible to move to Trunk-based development, although that requires a lot more than just switching to Git.
Trunk-based development is where you use a single branch for development, instead of multiple branches that you have to merge between.
More info at:
TBF, AIUI they're not, strictly speaking, happening with git either: They're an external addition, invented by GitHub or some such, and not actually part of git itself.
At that point I say to these people, why you even bother with git? Just use what I call ".zip versioning", that is archive the source code an call it "project-vX.Y.Z.zip" and put it on the company fileserver.
Or better learn how to use git, and that means learning the command line and throwing out every gui (well, not all of them, for example I do commit and push/pull with VSCode, but when I have to do serious stuff like merging stuff I do it with the command line). To my experience GUI always cause problems than corrupt the history of the repository.