The way I read it, it was wrapping in feature and bug fix changes. "We found a critical bug here, to fix it instead of backporting a fix we want to pull in all the code which was built before the bug was discovered".
I can understand the motivation. It's a PITA to support an older version of code. But that's not how linux gets it's stability.
He also had bad interactions with other developers, like constantly shitting on other file systems and generally behaving like a jerk completely unnecessarily.
Yeah, but then you run into scenarios where A+D is tested and ready, but B and/or C are not. Git does give you tools to separate them, but most people don't like doing that for various reasons.
IMHO, it may be more natural, but only during development. Trying to do a git bisect on git histories like the above is a huge pain. Trying to split things up when A is ready but B/C are not is a huge pain.
I can understand the motivation. It's a PITA to support an older version of code. But that's not how linux gets it's stability.