Yes, it is, and surely Linus has done a great job as a leader overall. Yet, some of his rants absolutely crossed some lines, so there is good reason to critisize him for that.

Perhaps, but we do not know how much better it could be today if potential contributors were not dissuaded by the politics and behavior of the existing participants.

Popularity is only one gauge of success. There are other metrics, such as personal satisfaction, missing features, or other things that the project may have failed or scored less well on.

But you don't know which contributors you'll lose if you change the project. I remember when FreeBSD added in their controversial new code of conduct, and some existing maintainers left. People keep acting like getting rid of a divisive leader will either result in improvements, or the status quo, but it could also cause the project to get worse.

Ok, let's assume that kernel developers will accept Ada Ehmke's "The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto", and attract lots of people with great interpersonal skills, with diverse backgrounds. They'll be successful, leading rich, full lives. Oh, they wouldn't depend on exerting all of their energy on contributing to software, but that's just a minor nuisance, right?

Sure, the kernel will become insanely great if this happens, right?!

All those potential GNOME or GIMP contributors that went to contribute to KDE because of RMS....

Next we will blame the lack of diversity in proprietary software on RMS too, I was afraid that it is something much more complicated but now that we found the problem all will be solved /sarcasm

> Perhaps, but we do not know how much better it could be today if potential contributors were not dissuaded by the politics and behavior of the existing participants.

Do you know how many potential contributors you'd lose by forcing adherence to liberal Californian politics? Most of the world does not adhere to them, even to the less objectionable ones.

I love it when arguments are so deeply grounded in facts.