I read only the beginning of that discussion. One idea that came to my mind is that they are really looking for a strict linter that do not allow many custom options, something that approaches the strictness of Crockford's JSLint, perhaps.

It was really difficult for me to understand that nodejs (internal?) source code could be that offensive to anyone to require this level of PC commitment, and I am not even a WASP...

It is also quite ironic that they do it on GitHub.