He's complaining about their "fix" being terrible, but isn't fully against using it the end since as you said, that's all there is going to be to have the chips work properly.
The reason he refuses those current patches and directly call it a lie/deception is because of what my last two paragraphs related; if you read his message (where the link points to) it's about half way: Intel tries to disguise it by doing it in a convoluted way. Basically they try to avoid making it obvious when looking at the code, because they don't want a "if (intel_chip) enable_fix_because_default_is_broken_on_intel();" and instead pushes something that looks like the kernel needs to do lots of complex stuff [aka, "it's complex, and a fix-on-chip is not enough the kernel needs protection anyway !", and that means a terrible patch with lots of garbage and filler code.
Intel's intention is clear in that they specifically pushes this in the same patchset as the "tell the chip to be secure", trying to mush the two things together to make it looks like it's all the same thing, whereas in reality it should be two patchset: one to enable the security mode, and bad for intel marketing wise. And a second one to add those "fixes" to the kernel, that would be refused because terrible and in part unecessary since retpoline already protects it.
What Linus is saying is "sure I need the first change, but since you're intent on pushing them together I'm refusing them, because the second one is pure garbage, and you mix them together to hide the first".
Eg quotes from said mail to show it's indeed his problem:
> So instead they try to push the garbage down to us. And they are doing
it entirely wrong, even from a technical standpoint.
and
> The patches do things like add the garbage MSR writes to the kernel
entry/exit points. That's insane. That says "we're trying to protect
the kernel". We already have retpoline there, with less overhead.
(what he means here is that they try in their patch to make it look like the kernel needs a special protection, while it already has it through retpoline)
and
> So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete
garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out. If this was about flushing the BTB at actual context switches between different users, I'd believe you. But that's not at all what the
patches do.
(eg "why are you pushing all this crap around to hide what's really happening/need to be executed")