For the life of me I cannot explain it, because the rise of distro carried Linux up the foodchain to mainframes and down to replace vxworks and ultimately dominate phones to spaceships.
Maybe it was people more than software?
I did download slackware floppy sets, over university internet connection, a few times. But it wasn't too long until there started to be Linux magazines available, and they'd often have a CD-ROM attached with a new distribution to try out.
(I actually remember having to buy a CD-ROM for the first time somewhere around 95, because my computer didn't have one and installing with floppies was getting very old by then.)
So yes, your first sentence answers your last one. :)
Contrast with many other open-source projects which allow the product to suffer rather than offending the contributors.
There was a "mailing list alpha male" culture back then which inspired a lot of people to join up. Maybe some people didn't like it, but in Linux's case, the cult of personality attracted a lot of followers.
Modern Linux dev is mostly a 8x5 job now, so that mercurial king stuff became really tired.
I'd forgotten that Linus started out with Minix.