Seems just a normal kernel discussion, very on point, on mergeframe and code quality. Linus is notoriously a tiny bottleneck and a very large PR with evident quality issues late in the merge, while the reviewer (you probably get to know what Linus is doing working with him) is travelling, that's something that needs a hard stop. Unneeded code that requires cleaning takes the name of garbage even if it took positive effort from who made it, when one of the most appreciated qualities of the product is maintainability. As always, Steve Jobs would just fire the person and everybody would applaud.
Linus having enough: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjLCqUUWd8DzG+xsOn-yVL0Q=...
The patches in question: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/mhng-7755CB81-B0C6-42D3-82B5-CE...
The authors response: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/mhng-655602B8-F102-4B0F-AF4A-4A...