As someone who did study computer science and has worked in embedded processor space (so one of the people who's written assembly by hand he's talking about).

I've never understood it either. People take his word as law blindly and it's never made sense to me. Yes he has skill, but so do hundreds of others. Yes he's opinionated, that's certainly not a reason to hero worship him.

For ten+ years people have been pointing out he's basically a single point of failure for Linux and begging for a succession plan and he's been too stuck up his own ass to accept that he isn't the only one who cares about all this.

This has lead to some extreme cult following behind him for some reason.