If it really was so urgent why didn't Kent just tell people to get those updates from his personal tree? There are rules in place if you want your stuff to get into Linus's tree, expecting Linus to pull whatever you sent him without any resistance whatsoever is likely just going to end up with him deleting your project, just like what happened here.
>It's not at all clear to me what really happened to make all the drama. A PR was made that contained something that was more feature-like than bugfix-like, and that resulted in a whole module being ejected from the kernel?
This isn't just a one time thing, speaking as someone who follows the kernel, apparently this has been going on pretty much since bcachefs first tried to get into Linus's tree. Kent even once told another kernel maintainer to "get your head examined" and was rewarded with a temporary ban.
Edit: To be fair, the kernel is infamous for being guarded by stubborn maintainers but really I guess the lesson to be learned here is if you want your pet project to stick around in the kernel you really can't afford to be stubborn yourself.
>it is inevitable that at some point there was and will be a need to push a new feature into a stable release for the purpose of data recovery
It's really not, the proper way to recover your important data is to restore from backups, not to force other people to bend longstanding rules for you.
>Do you really want to live in a world where data losses in stable releases is considered Okay?
It seems like the GPU should grow the capability to keep its VRAM intact through suspend, it's already complex[0] enough it's basically another computer attached to your computer anyway..