ESR often comes across as unbearably pompous and self-important, but here he strikes a very constructive posture of hard-earned humility and even tough love.
Or alternatively: this was 10 years ago, and the kernel is vastly more complicated now than it was then, running on hardware of a sophistication most of us scarcely imagined. And yet the kernel development model really hasn't changed much.
It may be that ESR was especially humble and constructive in that post. But honestly, I'd argue he was also objectively wrong.
How was ESR wrong? He seemed damn insightful to me. The curse of the gifted is a real thing. We've seen it many times before. Developers that can write 20 times the code of a "mere mortal" but don't think it's necessary to check it back in to version control. Or unit test, or run it through QA, or any of the other things that "mere mortals" need to do.
Sure, you can get away with this when you're operating in "Founder only mode," and you're the sole contributor, but his point is valid. If you don't plan for the point in time when you have hundreds of developers working on several branches of forked code before you reach that point, by the time you do, your project is doomed.
I've been and to a large extent am one of those in some cases and I can't imagine not using version control, or code sharing, or modularity. I also backup my code in several locations across thousands of miles of earth and ocean.
Look, "Founder only mode" is when the practices of these large corporations with lots of people depending on them are the most valuable, because everything depends on you. There aren't other people who can fill in and do your job. You have to be able to do it all. You can't skimp on any of the areas just because you're just you. Not if you expect anyone to depend on you, including yourself 6 months later when you have no idea what the code you wrote there does anymore.
And you don't want to have to repeat yourself all over the place so you modularize. That's how it's done at the big shops too. It's good practice.
I'd argue that Git greatly changed (maybe more so enhanced then changed) the model of the kernel and it seems that Linus did consider ESR's advice ultimately, and maybe that's what drove him to create git.
