Linus might be "a great guy" or "just Linus being Linus" but email like this has no place in a cooperative environment.
That is throwing the guy he's responding to and the whole GCC compiler team under the bus with a very thinly veiled personal attack.
If he was just hurling insults at the code, I could defend him, but that would look more like:
"What the 4.9.0 compiler is doing to my scheduler is fucking insane. It can't be spilling constants like this because we can get hit by an interrupt while the stack is insane and then we'll be screwed. And this other shit is worse and just has to fucking go."
Less pointing at the other devs and screaming that they're incompetent and more pointing at the code and screaming that its going to hose the shit out of the scheduler.
A professional would handle it like this:
1) He or she wouldn't choose to use such phrasing himself or herself, but also won't shy away from being firm and asking hard questions if they need to be asked.
2) If somebody else chooses such wording, the professional will engage his or her thick skin and ignore it, instead focusing on the parts that actually matter. It's resolving the problem at hand that's truly important, not wasting energy getting worked up over phrasing that somebody chose to use when describing the problem.