It all started because he was shitting on the NY Times for being an ad-ridden mess where you have to call a human in order to cancel your subscription. Someone called NY Times woke communist propaganda and Linus went nerd rage on them.
The whole thing doesn't depend on him it's just that he's the benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) of the Linux kernel and everyone pulls from his git tree. Linus just reviews and approves patchsets sent to the kernel to his tree and people trust his judgement.
There should really be corresponding kernels besides Linux but so much of the development and hardware bring up is focused on the Linux kernel.