It's a false dichotomy. You can give honest reviews and tell people they're wasting their time without resorting to "Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously."
It's a pity that some others have adopted Linus' loudness without also adopting his habits of grasping the issue and being right. Linus says "don't break the posix rules%@#$!$@#$", never "do as I prefer$#@$@#$!@#$". There's a big, big difference.
What would be the general level of frustration if something fundamental was broken?
More importantly, how frustrating it is to get back to the same kinds of problems?
(I remember a similar issue with ACPI where the kernel got into a 'fix/break/fix' loop until they decided to change the approach and not accept breakages anymore)
Also, one rule Torvalds holds kernel development to is "do not break user space". If a kernel patch exposes an API, the behavior of said API is fixed from that point onwards.
If a subsequent patch change the behavior, thus causing something in user space to error out, said patch is broken.
All this should be known to the person Torvalds is talking to, having doing this for some time. Yet when the issue is pointed out, he tries to pass the blame to user space.