I don’t doubt that people on all sides have made mis-steps, but from the outside it mostly just seems like Kent doesn’t want to play by the rules (despite having been given years of patience).
Kent seems very patient in explaining his position (and frustrations arising from other people introducing bugs to his code) and the kernel & debian folks are performing a smearing campaign instead of replying to what I see are genuine problems in the process. As an example, the quotes that are referenced by user paravoid are, imho, taken out of context (judging by reading the provided links).
There probably is a lot more history to it, but judging from that thread it's not Kent who looks like a bad guy.
So either Kent is on a righteous crusade against unreasonable processes within the Kernel, Debian, and every other large software project he interacts with. Or there's something about the way Kent interacts with these projects that causes friction.
I like Bcachefs, I think Kent is a very talented developer, but I'm not going to pretend that he is innocent in all this.
But the problem with comparisons is that even if you're better than nuclear waste being dumped into the aquifer, you still might be enough to light a river on fire.