By allowing more accessible and higher-quality tooling than email threads. It's amazing that the development workflow has chugged on for so long, but most people (outside of finance, here be dragons) work with modern tools in their day jobs... they're not gonna take their time and try to work with the limitations of arcane processes. Unfortunately, the "old guard" is firmly entrenched and has zero interest in moving with the times. Just look at the recent Rust/Apple SoC support drama.
In the end it's conflicting viewpoints and, let's be frank, a lack of money - the Linux kernel maintainers are overworked as it is, and each new piece of less-than-perfect code is likely to cause the maintainers a ton of work. More money would at least IMHO allow for getting new drivers up to speed.