Probably you are right, though in the case you linked the barrier was clearly insufficient. And OTOH, I have seen many cases where actually sane one-time contributors had to spend unreasonable time changing trivial patches to match the guidelines.

  [RFC PATCH] cmdline: Hide "debug" from /proc/cmdline

  It has come to our attention that a system running a specific user
  space init program will not boot if you add "debug" to the kernel
  command line.

Lol. I sometimes get disgusted by the kind of crap people merge, but it's nice that at least this one got the ridicule it deserved.