They're a consultancy: ultimately they do things because either some company paid them to do it, or because they think it will help bring in future business.

There are definitely companies out there who want to run "wrong endian" configs -- traditionally this was "I have a big endian embedded networking device and I want to move away from a dying architecture (e.g. MIPS or PPC) but I really don't want to try to find all the places in my enormous legacy codebase where we accidentally or deliberately assumed big endian".

Personally I'm not in favour of having the niche usecase tail wag the general toolchain dog, and I think that's the sentiment behind Linus's remarks.