After twenty plus years of watching LKML and Linus’s behavior in general, I have to concur with you.
Reading a lot of the ‘linus is an asshole’ threads, there’s generally a clear runup towards an outburst.
Just recently he called some developers out because it seemed evident they weren’t testing their patchsets on bare metal.
So it’s not just code that gets called out, it’s also development methods that end up causing upstream pain.
Found “recent” post on LWN.