Bcachefs may be headed out of the kernel

Kent is in the wrong. Having a lead position in development I would kick Kent of the team.

One thing is to challenge things. What Kent is doing is something completely different. It is obvious he introduced a feature, not only a Bugfix.

If the rules are set in a way that rc1+ gets only Bugfixes, then this is absolutely clear what happens with the feature. Tolerating this once or twice is ok, but Kent is doing this all the time, testing Linus.

Linus is absolutely in the right to kick this out and it's Kent's fault if he does so.

I've seen this sentiment a lot lately. That disagreeable top performers have to be disposed of because they are "toxic" or "problematic".

You aren't doing your job as a leader if this is your attitude to good engineers. Engineering is a field where a small amount of the people create a large amount of the value. You can either understand that, and take it upon yourself to integrate disagreeable yet high performing people into the team, paving over the rough patches yourself. Or you can oust them, and quite literally take a >50% productivity hit on your team.

A disagreeable person will take up more of your time as a manager, but a high performer is worth significantly more of your time. When these traits co-occur in the same person, the cost-benefit is complicated. The reason we talk about this problem a lot in tech is because it is legitimately a tough call, with errors in both directions. Wishing that the right move was always as simple as kicking someone off the team doesn't make it true, although it may relieve you from having to contend with the decision.

Ideally, you teach people how to get along better together; I think of my job as manager (and I effectively do manage a large team these days) as one of teaching and fostering good communication.