I agree with the first part, but not with the second part. I believe equating John's behaviour to a chef who has told a customer off is just as distant as mine.

If I was looking exact equivalent, I would just send the same link to the same email.

I am using empathy here. I don't know you guys, you may feel ok if you get shouted when you do wrong when contributing to a project, but I would feel bad, and as a human, I don't think my feelings are not important. If it is coming from an important person like Linus Torvalds, this would hurt even more, and really I don't see anything disrespectful to anyone in John's email.