I truly feel like Linus did a lot of damage by normalising his brand of leadership. Younger developers wanting to emulate someone as accomplished as Linus unsurprisingly adopted the habits that are easiest to emulate - name calling, attacking, denigrating, dismissing.

Linus is better now but the behaviour is ingrained into so many people. They now “tell it like it is”, are “straight shooters”, don’t have time to be “politically correct” and so on.