> I can't be bowing to the demands of any one person
This right here is the core of the issue. When you're working as a part of a larger organizational structure, you have to bow down to your boss. When your software is a part of the kernel, it's not your project anymore; it's just one part of Linus's project. You're a contributor, not a leader. Just like I would not control Bcachefs's development process even if I contributed some small but important part to it, you do not control Linux's development process even though you contributed some small but important part to it.
Your core mission is evidently not shipping a reliable trustworthy filesystem. You say that, but your actions speak louder than your words. You know just as well as I do that a filesystem being in-tree rather than out-of-tree makes it significantly more reliable and trustworthy, which is why you chose to get Bcachefs merged into the kernel in the first place. Instead of working within the well-defined boundaries that's necessary to keep Bcachefs in the kernel, you've repeatedly pushed against those boundaries, belittled fellow maintainers, and in general worked hard to make yourself a persona non grata within the kernel community. The predictable outcome is that continued development of Bcachefs will have to happen out-of-tree, and your users won't gain the major reliability and trustworthiness benefits of using an in-tree filesystem. People will warn against using Bcachefs as their root filesystem, since every kernel upgrade will now carry some risk that DKMS or whatever mechanism is used to install the out-of-tree Bcachefs kernel module doesn't work with the new kernel.
And, to be honest, it doesn't matter whether or not you're "right" or "wrong" here. Maybe you're completely correct about absolutely everything and Linus, Greg, Ted, Miguel, Sasha, Josef, and everyone else involved are stupid and don't understand what it takes to develop reliable software. So what? They're your colleagues, some of them are your bosses. Everyone on Hacker News could take your side here and think you've been mistreated, it doesn't help. You'd still be thrown out of the kernel. You'd still be failing your users by not maintaining a good enough relationship with your colleagues and bosses to stay in-tree. You could be completely right on every technical matter and it does not matter.
If you play your cards right, you could maybe end up in a situation where you run the Bcachefs project entirely out-of-tree, with yourself as the supreme leader who doesn't bow down to the demands of anyone, with your own development and release process; and then someone else takes responsibility for pushing your code into the upstream kernel, following Linus's rules. They would dissect your releases and backport bug fixes while leaving out important features, in accordance with Linus's rules. Time will tell if you can find anyone to do that. And time will tell if you posess the humility necessary to let someone else ultimately control the experience most of your users will have.