It would be difficult to determine if his style has been an overall net benefit or net deficit though. Certainly things worked out well, but would they have worked out better if he took a different approach?
Talented people, that made concrete contributions, have left because they didn't want to deal with him. One example: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06/linix_kernel_dev_wh...
I can imagine some one staying away from certain ecosystems because they are too nice to inconpetence. For example, say, how pythons standard JSON library intentionally and likely well intended, breaks the the standard and causes hours of debugging nightmare.
In a less friendly world this wouldnt fly and if i need something that actually works ill have a strong bias for the products of the "mean people"