Yep the maintainer repeated threw in stuff late in the release cycle . Here's one instance

The clash stems from a long‑standing debate on kernel rhythm: Linus enforces strict release-cycle discipline, allowing only minimal fixes during release candidates.

At the same time, Kent submitted substantive changes (a patch implementing the new “journal_rewind” feature, which lets the entire filesystem be reset to an earlier point in time) justified by urgent data-recovery needs, though they landed late in the cycle.

For sure. And it wasn’t that simple during the rust shenanigans in February I’d say, but these personalities love to come up and cause trouble 😅. It’s really the nature of open source though; you’ll find similar in major open source projects. Hashicorp GitHub issues come to mind as an easy example.