Linus called out on some behaviour. That is not him saying that people should stop developing. It's him saying stop this behaviour.
Christopher Barry is most certainly not a troll.
As shown in the LKML and Debian debates, the systemd infestation was firmly opposed by nearly everyone outside the 'vested interest' RedHat filter bubble. And still is.
Some high profile names would be Eric S. Raymond or Patrick Volkerding (creator of Slackware).
Debian has been forked over this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devuan
That is not him saying that people should stop developing. It's him saying stop this behaviour.
It's him finally calling Kay Sievers out for being incompetent and an asshole. Which was long overdue.
Sadly it's by far too late and will very likely not change a thing about systemd's "break and extinguish" strategy.
Systemd will continue to break other peoples projects in its effort to replace every mature service implementation with a hacked up systemd imitation.
At least until, hopefully, the major distros finally acknowledge their mistake and roll this disaster back.
Literally everyone with a clue in the matter seems to hate systemd with passion[1].
A long-term Debian Maintainer quit over the issue[2].
Linus himself (as you quoted) seems more than a little annoyed by systemd and its developer.
And yet somehow systemd made its way into all major distros...
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/12/459
[2] http://err.no/personal/blog/2014/Nov/16