It seems that it's common practice on phoronix to list the employer of the person submitting the patch. I found a few examples where Intel, Google, and Amazon are all mentioned

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Bu...

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-Z...

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=L1d-Cach...

It's pretty common for Michael to add the affiliation/organization of people involved, since the social aspects are as interesting as the technical ones.

For example, since Alyssa Rosenzweig writes full-length articles about her and others' work on Mesa drivers for Mali GPUs, she is mentioned in article titles or in main paragraphs, or Collabora is mentioned.

Michael also covers interesting hires and organizational changes, like Valve hiring another developer for RADV this week, Valve is prominent in the title because it is important social information.

I could imagine that Microsoft has dealt with similar issues, which would give the proposal extra credibility to me.

But the article is lazy and doesn't mention why it's important, so we're all going to infer something different about it.

If he was an ex-Microsoft engineer, or a Microsoft engineer working on his own, I don’t think it would matter.

If Microsoft is using the hours of the engineer’s workday for this purpose, it provides insight that does matter.

It's probably very practical for exposing VM hosts apis to VM guests like they do in wsl

I think it gives credability right off the bat.

Ideally, it wouldn't.

But we don't live in that world. Someone that name drops their company name is more credible that some random blogger that works at a hardware store

It is better than some random person giving idea on some project. If a Microsoft employee is proposing on behalf of the employer it has more chance of being proceeded forwarded/maintained/funded.