You're making a false equivalency where stern is the same as toxic. There are more professional and clear ways to communicate the issues with code quality. No one is disagreeing that those need to be communicated. The Issue is how.

And because you seem to take stock in what Torvalds says, then consider that if he himself admitted these were harmful and inefficient methods of communication then they probably were. If it was leading to fantastic results in the kernel i don't see why he would've stopped. My guess is that he learned something that it seems you may still have yet to: empathy.

You want some stern words?

You are a useless peace of dead weight in this community. Your comments suck and you have no idea how people work and how to professionally communicate. I hope you never have a job, let alone one in a management role. You should leave and never come back. Get aborted retroactively! You make the world a worse place by your mere existance!

How do you feel about that? Are you going to change your behavior because of these "stern words"? Or are you going to think "What an idiot" and ignore everything I said?

And we both are just anonymous randos on the internet and while this comment is public, not a lot of people are going to read it and it will have zero impact to either of our lives.

Now imagine I was your boss, both of us are publically known people and I post this on the company social media account together with your full name.

And people still dig this up 10 years later to laugh at it.

Please reconsider your interpersonal behaviour.