I find the debates about his toxicity to be essentially pointless, especially since he's not in an employer employee relationship with the people he works with.

Nobody has to work with him, and you chose not to. You don't contribute your kernel patches because you don't like the guy. And that's fine, and I even agree with your assessment that he's been abrasive.

On the other hand, it's his project. He does get to be dictator of his own project and the philosophies behind it. This is the beauty of open source: unlike proprietary software where money and power is everything, everyone is free to fork the kernel and stop dealing with him. In the open source world there are a long list of forks that have turned out to be more popular than their original projects.

The other beautiful thing about open source in this arrangement is that the people he's being a jerk to are people he has an employer power dynamic over.

If my boss is a jerk to me, yeah, that really sucks, because if I get fired my family doesn't eat. I'm forced to interact with that person, at least for a time.