alt Hacker News> No, it's more like saying "I judge an artist on my terms regardless of how well they sell on the market".
I feel like I need to push back here, because some of the best programmers around: Carmack, Torvalds, Johnathan Blow, even folks that make programming languages like K&R, Rob Pike, etc. are judged on their respective end products, not on minutia found in code reviews. For example, if I asked you "why do you think Stroustrup is a good programmer?"—you wouldn't cite some obscure optimization he came up with, but would rather talk about his overall vision for C++, his ideas of evolving C, his staunch anti-GC takes over the years (and their justification), etc.
You're contradicting yourself. First you say that they're judged on the end product, then you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products.
Frankly, I have no real idea of how good Carmack, Torvalds or Blow are as programmers, I have never worked with them so I don't really have a way to tell (even though I do contribute to Linux and I've seen some of their code). They're likely past a certain above-average threshold, but they haven't got famous for their programming skills.
That said, if you think Torvalds isn't being judged on "minutia found in code reviews", I'm not sure your take is very serious in the first place - that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now :)