This is a bit like asking "is your goal to bake bread, or to use flour?", and when the baker says "to bake bread, obviously", replying "so you don't mind if we just throw away all your flour, right?". I would side with the baker who says that people who go around throwing away the flour are probably doing it to sabotage baking bread, not because they want to improve the quality of bread.
The Linux Documentation Project existed long before these people came. And if "dealing effectively with people" is what we currently observe, I'd say no thanks.
a) You’re there to work on the kernel, and because that’s the end goal you out up with the CoC;
b) You’re there for the reputation and/or meritocracy, so the CoC feels like a personal attack.
Is that it?
Be clear, though: this is nothing but my reading of ESR's statement of his own perspective on the issue, even all the facts of which are somewhat difficult to identify without ambiguity. I'm not especially interested in trying to make any larger argument than that, and I'm not at all sure that the desire for meritocracy and reputation is incompatible with the adoption of an explicit code of conduct requiring that kernel contributors, while contributing to the kernel, eschew gratuitous misbehavior of the sort which tends to drive other contributors and potential contributors away from the project.
As I read the CoC in question (https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-condu...), I see nothing in it which suggests any intent beyond that. In particular, I see nothing suggesting any intent toward thought policing, or policing of behavior outside the context of interactions in the Linux kernel development community, or declared public representation of same. And the Technical Advisory Board, charged with enforcement of the CoC, is just that - technical. So I really don't know where all this culture war stuff is coming from, or why anyone sees a need for it.
Okay, that's a lie. I do know where it's coming from, and why people on both sides see a need for it. It's just that I wish they didn't - again, on both sides - because the Linux kernel is too important a technological artifact to be made this sort of battlefield. I'm sure it'll blow over in the end, and that the silent majority that invariably constitutes the audience for such engagements will go on doing as they do, not at all ruffled by the explicit adoption of a standard of behavior that really says nothing more than "don't be an asshole, and if you're enough of an asshole, we won't let you work with us any more".
That is to say - the same rule that applies everywhere, whether explicitly stated or otherwise. In my experience, the correlation between worthwhile kernel contributors, and people who enshrine Linus Torvalds' own somewhat infamous former style of comportment as somehow essential to technical excellence in the project, is negligible unto imperceptibility - so I see no reason to imagine that the project itself is imperiled by this current contretemps. That contention is really the only reason why it's achieved as wide a currency as it has, I think; absent the - in my reading highly questionable - idea that a significant fraction of kernel contributors will withdraw their contributions in a way that actively harms further development, there's no reason I can see for so many pundits of ESR's and /g/'s stripe to weigh in so heavily and with such typical respect for the facts and realities of the matters on which they choose so to speak.
"...[Accusing anti-CoC community members of sexism and the like] can only inflame their sense that the group telos is being hijacked. They make it clear; they signed on to participate in a meritocracy with reputation rewards, and they think that is being taken [away] from them."
Is the telos to produce a kernel, or is the telos to "participate in a meritocracy with reputation rewards"? ESR's piece gives much overt consideration to the question of "what is the telos?", but even granting that that question is not itself disingenuous in the context of LKML, the quoted passage somewhat deftly sneaks in an answer of its own, between all the many waves of hands about how "[that] last paragraph may sound like I have strayed from neutrality into making a value claim, but not really" and the like.
I suspect a large number of people with commits in the kernel trunk would be surprised to learn that they're really there for the meritocracy, rather than for the work...