In a way I understand him, the culture is too one sided in its values. There isn't a balance or a good middle ground. If you appreciate irony, it's too optimised for "features". For which I generally agree. So the people upholding these values are too lazy to find the balance.
As an aside, every Dev I know would love to endlessly iterate and improve a single thing. So I understand finding that balance isn't easy either.
Unless it's Teams apparently, that's the last Electron app I want to install.
How is that mindset lazy? Unhappy customers also have a cost! At my last job the customer just always bought hardware specifically for the software as a matter of process, partly because the price of the hardware compared to the price of the software was negligible. You literally couldn't make a customer care.
Oops, forgot the AI step
Optomisation often has a cost, weather it's code complexity, maintenance or even just salary. So it has to be worth it, and there are many areas where it isn't enough unfortunately.
Part of that problem is developers are drawn to Shiny too. So things people may want, start working in a random distro first. Then when you are comparing these features people want to Windows, it's often a catch up game.
But I think the framing the whole thing even to just the comparing the lagging features of a stable and usable distro to well... Windows is still a pretty good light.
Well have to accept that "Linux can't X" and keep all the (um actually) caveats hush until it just works. Then hopefully with enough traction and resources that time gap will shorten.
If you feel like you need to reinstall Windows anyway, Trying out Linux is a pretty low bar if you're curious. In that situation I think everything Linus did seems plausible.
You framed is as a non ideal philosophy. But acknowledging the things slowing down breaks and taking the time to make a calculated step so things don't break anyway when updating can be appealing. I see it as a slightly faster stable. Inefficient maybe, but that's just a difference in values. In practice it sounds like this hasn't worked for some, guess I've been lucky. There maybe be other distros that do this better now, I couldn't tell you, but from a, comparing philosophical differences point of view, Manjaro seems like an option.