Recently I have been seeing leaders in software communities regardless of being correct or not, basically blowing up on other software developers on the internet because of something _stupid_ they have done or said.
That's only because you've started paying attention recently and that is only because you, like so many people (myself included), get your dose of interesting news from places like Hacker News, instead of participating directly in, say, kernel development.
Let's face it, it has become trendy to criticize outstanding people with outstanding accomplishments for being rude. Yeah, okay, I get it: nobody likes being humiliated. Plus, everyone has been humiliated at some point in their life and isn't it just incredible how, after all that time, it still smarts to remember it?
It's easy to jump to conclusions and on the bandwagon, easy and righteous to join the mob with pitchforks and torches. It's a lot harder to put yourself in the shoes of "the rude dude" and wonder whether you have all the context you need in order to judge him or her.
REALLY?! Just because you were fortunate to work on something that is widely used and appreciated does that give you the right to openly belittle people's efforts and work.
The short answer? Yes. The long answer is a bit more complicated, but since you and so many others seem to like simplifying things, I thought I would offer the short answer first.
The long answer is that I've seen that kind of reaction firsthand from people who have built something incredibly complex from scratch, know it inside out and get the same well-intentioned but poorly thought-out suggestions all the freaking time. It doesn't stop there, unfortunately. Those kinds of things tend to get debated to death, because bikeshedding is so alluring. More often than not, the person who offered the suggestion in the first place will get offended when their suggestion gets tossed out summarily, without realizing that they're far from first to come up with that idea. And some of those who get offended will react badly and even abusively. So in the end, the guy who built the damn thing decides that maybe they don't have to take that shit anymore.
Yeah, I know, Mom and Dad taught me to be polite to everyone and never be rude and say "please" and "thank you" and two wrongs don't make a right and I shouldn't sink down to "their" level and all that. You know what? I can't imagine being as accomplished as Linus or Crockford and turning the other cheek all the time, not when there are people who will write stuff like "Just because you were fortunate to work on something that is widely used and appreciated". Nope, they were not fortunate. If you think that's luck, you should spend your time playing lottery.
And then there's the assumption that every time we see the kind of reaction Linus is famous for, it's because someone feels entitled to "belittle people's efforts and work". Never mind that it might be a situation in which no effort or actual work took place. Never mind that it might have been something truly dumb and a little research would have revealed it to be a staggeringly bad idea. Hell, never mind that it could have been a troll and that seeing a reply for which there is no original message should have indicated to you, as a reader, that there's a missing piece and that you simply don't have enough information.
No, let's all be self-righteous instead, because -- to paraphrase xkcd -- someone was rude on the Internet.