It's probably been a long time since he was trying to steer the project to his standard of perfection, he gave up on that. Like he grew apart from it, life got in the way, and steering Linux is now more of a job than anything else.
What I'm saying is, 2004's Linus would have never allowed Rust into the kernel.
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
it would be nice to program drivers in php, it will open up the space to a lot more contributors!