I've never read that about Torvolds, who I believe uses fairly standard GNOME. Could you be confusing him with Stallman who does things like use wget for browsing the internet?
Driver support for bare metal use on the M2 Air was really, really poor at the time. Linus mentions Asahi Linux, so he probably wasn't running virtualized Linux under macOS. Maybe he SSHed into the box, or it wasn't an M2 model after all.
Fedora's primary distribution may have Gnome, but there are many other desktop environments that are available "out of the box", as I'm sure you know. I've been running Fedora on dozens of systems over the last decade and I've never used Gnome -- because it's annoying and supremely unintuitive.
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0X...
And more context (I am not sure if it's accurate):
https://twitter.com/asahilinux/status/1553968394734813184
Driver support for bare metal use on the M2 Air was really, really poor at the time. Linus mentions Asahi Linux, so he probably wasn't running virtualized Linux under macOS. Maybe he SSHed into the box, or it wasn't an M2 model after all.