Using language like "monstrosity" though, doesn't help.

The word has several meanings, and I took it to mean "frighteningly large" rather than any of the more negative ones. Perhaps not the best choice, but not overtly rude.

"Monstrosity" seems like a fair word, and to the point as well. The follow-up messages showed good will on the part of the kernel maintainers.

I guess that's not you that have to do the review.

Heh. I've certainly been handed stuff I didn't like. It's always been easier to work through if I avoided anything that came off as emotional or insulting.

Sorry, dad.

We’ll all try really hard to ignore our individual biology to satisfy the most sensitive sensibilities.

Cause that expectation is not manipulative at all.

Could you please stop posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments to HN? Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

If it's working code (assume it is) then requiring it to be turd-polished for the purposes of code review is absurd. Whoever is asking for that is either disingenuous or has no real experience as a software developer.