If the patch that contains the entire fix (minus cleanup) doesn't work, then the entire patchset is unreliable, since the author necessarily doesn't understand it.
I couldn’t diagnose or debug some intermittent faults in poor multi-threaded code (written by someone who struggles to think concurrently). I threw the code away and wrote it properly from scratch and that got rid of the data or race conditions causing the intermittent fault. I have had to fix multi-threaded code many many times because I am better than most at properly fixing it.
But for the record, the author has since found the issue, and in this case it indeed was a bug in the first patch that was inadvertently fixed by a later patch in the series:
https://probablydance.com/2022/09/17/finding-the-second-bug-...