I don't think this is uncommon behavior for the name of a product to effect who is willing to try it out. He likely thought Fedora was being suggested by his users because of the meme of fedoras. Google "fedora meme" for more information.
Now, is this the most rational behavior? No, not at all but it is what you need to expect from the average user. Branding is important. If I started an advanced system service company for IT and called my business "ASS Help" I'm going to get a lot of errant requests.
> with nearly every problem he has it seems to be exacerbated into a total disaster
Linus plays an energetic character. I wouldn't put much stock into how "irate" he seems. I would however expect anyone who hits similar roadblocks to him to actually act this way. If an average user plugs in another monitor and it doesn't instantly work they will be very upset.
> Even more surprising was how calmly Luke handled everything
Also important to note: Luke adjacent to software developers, has done some software development work, and has used Linux before for an extended period of time.
Luke also plays the straight faced silent type in their Penn and Teller.
> Linus flies off on a six-minute tangent where he tries to argue that CLI tools shouldn't exist, only to have the chat dogpile him and remind him that piping between CLI programs is an essential component of Linux
1. I don't think Linus thinks CLI tools should not exist (as he uses them often for advanced tasks) but he feels like they shouldn't be the only option. As someone who daily drives Linux on my desktop, laptop, and work computers since 201Xs I rarely use the command line for average user things.
2. The end consumer user of a product doesn't really care about the philosophy of the software they are using for. I'd even go so far as to say that the Linux community doesn't even feel this way. If we did, we would all be using BSD-style 100% POSIX compliant systems. I'm much faster with the CLI than I am with a GUI for most development related tasks (installing software, unzipping things, moving files, diagnosing performance things) but that is not representative of the average user. For example: ask the average Mac power user how to check how overworked their CPU is. Will they pull out `top`? Probably not.
> Linus continued spinning his wheels with the 'muh accessability' bit
Mockingly saying "muh accessibility" doesn't address the concern: if we want Linux adoption on the desktop we need to make it so that the average Windows or MacOS user can be productive in the system without any CLI involvement. Or, at least, no more CLI involvement than with Windows and Mac.
> Linus lets his ego stand in the way of correct technical solutions
I think, ironically, this is the ego of the Linux community. We cannot expect users to be rational. We need to make things simpler (not in terms of "purity" like POSIX adherence) for the end user. Linus brings up a great point: almost no distro has a full time team working to A/B test the OS to see if it's friendly for new users. I can think of only one instance of this happening sometime around 2015: Gnome.
Also, if this was pure ego, Linus' opinions would be very different. From this Friday's episode Luke was negative on the prospects of the Steam Deck being shipped with Linux while Linus thinks it will be great. I agree with Linus, and the reason he thinks it will work great. Steam Deck, and Steam OS, will tune all the nobs and installed packages in a standard way for game devs to target. This makes it simple! Linus and Luke both agreed that for non-gaming normal user tasks Linux OSs are currently at an A to an A+ in terms of usability.