At every place I worked the motto for hiring has always been, you could be the best person in the industry for this job but if you’re an asshole we don’t want to hire you. I can’t agree more with that. I don’t care how good his code is, if he’s an asshole then I don’t want to submit to his project. He’s like the Elon Musk of Linux. We don’t need to support those types of assholes. I wouldn’t do paid work for Twitter or Telsa because of Elon, I ain’t going to do work for Linux for Linus.
Also, one person is not the life of a project but they can define the project’s culture. If Linus wants to write Linux all himself with a cult of followers then sure, he can have a slightly more successful version of TempleOS. He’s still not going to attract the world of developers out there that are far better as a whole and more successful as a whole than him. He proudly defines and encourages this toxic culture and it keeps very talented developers away. Frankly, someone should fork the Linux kernel and create a non-toxic work environment for people.