It is kind of fly-by-the-pants... But when you know a change could break at runtime on some hardware, and there's no testing organization with a full or even representative sample of supported hardware, and there's no real way to try it and then fallback at runtime, the options are push it out through the (emergent) testing process and see what happens or push it out disabled where almost nobody will use it.

If only a few issues were noticed, those device dricers could likely be fixed with small code changes and most people would be happy. When Linus's machine breaks, there's a heuristic that many machines will break, so that's a recipie for a release that will cause lots of upset.