And that’s fine! It’s incredible that a collaborative effort like Linux (protected by the GPL, which forces the issue) can pull in all these big companies’ resources, given that the companies would probably prefer to have their employees work on things that only benefit them and not their competitors.
The first might produce quick, but unsustainable or less perfect results, the latter might take more time but will provide significant benefits (in this case for maintenance, time wasted/energy consumed by build pipelines on a global scale).
Edit: obviously not at this scale. 2300 patches at once in a fork is a lot.
Large-scale changes also suffer from "too many cooks in the kitchen" and bikeshedding that can make getting the changes accepted a real slog. It is difficult to get people to buy into your vision purely with words, either because they don't see the value in it or they reflexively disagree that the benefits are achievable (sometimes motivated by their own burnout or cynical attitude).
The solution is to work on it in semi-secret until you can get things to a point where the value is demonstrated. That bypasses endless bikeshedding and pointless feedback rounds because everyone can see the value of the end state (if you've chosen something worthwhile to work on).
The same applies at 100 LoC.
And at 10.