It's just a placeholder for wharever number makes sense in the clearly expressed context. Either substitute $5000 or $10000, or substitute whatever location or demographic you imagined (since none was specified) for some other location or demographic. You can't start in the US and vacation in Venice for $1000, but you absolutely can vacation somewhere else and/or somehow else.
Or, just pretend they said whatever other number you like, because the specific amount was not material to the point they were expressing.
Things always degenerate when it turns into power struggles and people are going "No, I decide!".
"Make sure thinks work" is the underlying principle, and it's based on that that the code should have been, and was merged.
But then the personality conflicts and power struggles came out, and there's no need for that.
- You don't go overriding a subsystem maintainer without a clear justification; if the patch in question has a good reason for being there and can't affect the rest of the kernel, there's a really high bar to clear. This has been an issue for the XFS folks in the past.
- We have to be able to have technical and policy discussions without it degenerating into "I don't trust you and you need therapy". That's just childish. The private discussions got really ugly on this one.
And, regarding bcachefs still being marked as experimental: I'm being much more conservative with the experimental label than btrfs or ext4 were. Your data is safer on bcachefs than btrfs, today: you're not going to lose a filesystem, repair is thorough and robust and complete.
You may still hit hiccups, which is why the experimental label is there, but robust and complete repair and rock solid multi device have been reason enough for a lot of people to switch already.
This is not a case of 2 equal entities failing to find a compromise.
One is both technically more valid and has the simple right to set the terms and processes regardless of other opinions, the other is neither. All failure to function is on Kent, not on any "struggle".