How is this not the top comment? I was scratching my head wondering until I found your links.
So the smackdown from Linus is what motivated it. Honestly though if you read the email Linus is replying to, it was deserved. To be fair, Hector Martin may be one of the smartest hackers alive today. His fame goes way back to hacking the Playstation 3 with geohot and Hector has even found security vulnerabilities in Apple Silicon. He's done great work with Asahi Linux by weaponizing his keen penetrating mind to support open source freedom. But like his buddy geohot he can be a bit childish. Right now Hector seems to be laying low. His social media accounts are no longer accessible. It seems even archive.org and archive.today have no recollection of him. That's impressive.
So what triggered him to act out of character? It seems like he wrote his Apple GPU driver in Rust and he needed Rust DMA support in the kernel. I know, a curious thing for a Rust developer to want more power to do things that are memory unsafe. So the DMA maintainer Christoph Hellwig hates Rust. He thinks Rust is a cancer in the kernel. Cristoph refused to help Martin create Rust APIs for DMA. That's why he went ballistic.
Chances are they'll all make up when this blows over, or someone will just rewrite his GPU driver in C. There's not going to be as big of a push for Rust with this recent government. For example, the White House recently took down its paper about the future of programming being memory safe. The money for Rust is going to dry up. It's becoming socially acceptable to push back against efforts to convert everyone to Rust.