It's definitely killing a mosquito with a nuke, but what are the alternatives? The kernel maintainers claim these bogus commits already put too much load on their time. I understand they banned the whole university out of frustration and also because they simply don't have the time to deal with them in a more nuanced way.
There's a real cost. What's your estimate for going through each of these 190 patches individually, looking at the context of the code change, and whether the "ref counting or whatever" bug fix is real, and doing some real testing to ensure that?
That looks like quite some significant effort. Now if most of those fixes were real, now after the revert there will be 190 known bugs in the kernel, before it's all cleaned up. That may have some cost too.
Looks like a large and expensive mess someone other than that UNI will have to clean out, because they're not trustworthy, ATM.
Nobody else that the UMN is even contributing patches, other than these bad faith ones, so this is only banning one set of bugs. Given that a lot of bugs have come from one source banning that source bans a lot of bugs. It doesn't stop them all, but it stops some.
