Many people are happily following Linus' directions. Sometime he enforces those directions rudely, which drives some people away. It also prevents crappy patches from stubborn contributors from going through.
I always considered certain kinds of programming to be like smithing on a hot forge: If you can't handle the occasional burn, then it's not for you. I mean this idea is not even a little bit controversial when it's about tangential things, for example people that are unable to work with tight deadlines in stressful situations. Either you can do it, or you can't. Nobody would reasonably suggest changing the market or the business model to accommodate. Because you can't reasonably suggest that, because reality just doesn't work that way. We can only get a Linux kernel of the caliber we have today by using a hot forge. Now it's certainly true that some good ideas will be deflected in these kinds of environments -- just as happens in all environments -- but nobody would reasonably suggest that any kind of environment could achieve perfect meritocratic efficiency, either. Because it's not possible to do that anymore than it's possible to make financial markets less stressful places to work with looser deadlines. This is a roundabout way of saying that this (and everything like it) boils down to innate competitive humanity and as we all know, when it comes to anything that involves more than one person, you can't make everyone happy all the time.
To be honest, I don't see any point in overly hot forges in the workplace. People hopefully go to work because they like what they do there. But on the other hand it's sometimes difficult to prevent, like as you might suggest in financial market jobs, or of course in many Startup jobs which don't have much money.
Anyways, Linux is a project made by Linus Torvalds and it developed along his Philosophy of doing this. If someone doesn't like that, there are enough choices like Windows or macOS. Or for more tech-savvy people there are other options like for instance the BSD flavours.
But with respect to your first couple of paragraphs, I think it's really a lucky set of circumstances that allow a person to work a job in a workplace that they enjoy, and I will say for the both of us (presuming of course that you feel the same way) that we are very lucky to work in the industry we work in. But I also feel very strongly that jobs are -- for most of the rest of humanity -- something that people do because they have to and not because they particularly enjoy it. There are obviously workplaces with hot forges and I would argue that there are more workplaces with figurative (and literal) hot forges than workplaces without. I worked a job for a number of years which required me to carry (and use) various kinds of machine guns. Now I can't say I didn't enjoy it personally, but it's true that most guys were there because they had few other options. They were working a job with a hot forge because if they didn't, their kids would go hungry. I mean I'm pretty sure there would be no humans working at McDonalds in the Star Trek universe.