Cool assumption. But pretty sure it's not how things work at all but sounds great...

What actually happens is that you have a long list of multiple maintainers reviewing , and multiple branches for testing, and multiple layers of review too.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/process/maintainers.html . See that long list of maintainers for a start.

The actual policy is that everything ends up getting reviewed by a human. If I post a patch, it doesn't go straight to master

If it's not being properly tested and maintained, it gets dropped irrespective of what it is (remember devfs?)

Also, I'm not sure about the kernel specifically, but on projects I submitted code to, they often wanted complex patches broken down if possible.