Except, its not a route to good quality.

Looks at what is just in what Linus said:

1. BUG_ON, which has been around forever, is dangerous and should not exist.
2. Linus reviewed the "awful" code and passed it.
3. The awful code was a fix for a bug that has been known and existed for almost 3 years.
4. Linus bagged up the whole sack of shit and laid it at someone else's feet, without any acknowledgement of the process failures that made something apparently so incredibly rant-worthy possible with a simple human failure.

If he wasn't so caustic and so focused on assigning blame, and instead turned one single childish rant into a simple question of "why did this happen?", there is a pretty good chance that some improvements could be made that can prevent multiple simple human failures in the future.

I'm by no means saying that everyone should get a trophy for trying their best. And the crux of it really isn't even that he should be nicer... but he should at least be constructive. This is literally "we have created a minefield, and you stepped on mine, thus you are a fucking idiot. This is all your fault, and I'm going to yell loud enough and long enough that we never have to think about why its a minefield in the first place."