The wouldn't have even had to push smaller changes - there are ways in git to do a commit that basically overwrites the current state of the branch, but doesn't require a force push. We use it where I work when promoting branches (e.g. to production branch) so that we never ever have to worry about merge conflicts or force pushing. It's a merge strategy that basically says "When merging, just use parent 1, and pretend parent 2 doesn't exist when calculating files, etc."

actually it would be much less bad if it was. Gentoo GPG verification still doesn't work quite right, but most users of the kernel for critical purposes do GPG verification.