upstreamed PR means nothing in 2026. I couldn't care less when some maintainer are just so political, still remember the rust in kernel drama a couple of years ago? why great work have to get approvals from those people?
Sure, let's see how the hardware you enjoy in November behaves in March after they rebase the kernel to 7.5.
If an LLM can write working code in the first place, it can almost certainly port it to an updated kernel. I first got my M4 Pro running Linux under 7.2, and moving to 7.3 took Claude about 15 minutes.
Upstreamed PRs are the only thing people run. You can whine, sling ad-hominem at maintainers and recompile a custom kernel for every minor version bump, but nobody else is going to. If you don't go through the upstream, your code is never being run at-scale.