Not only that, Linus was not immediately overwhelmed by external contributions but had the time to become intimate with the project and its evolution.
While I get what Antirez is saying, and I see why it can work and scale for him, there's a bit of nuance missing: everything he says it's true, as long as you, the coder, actually spend a lot of time studying and planning what you want to achieve as you iterate.
Which, coincidentally, it's what Antirez himself did both for DwarfStar or Redis Arrays. He spent a gargantuan amount of time before he wrote a single line of code till he could largely explain the system, the design choices and their tensions.
No we are not linus now, LLMs are not humans, agents don't think, don't 'know' when they fuck up. Even making the comparison is just disrespectful to everyone involved