[nephyrin]

> if that person quits or the company discontinues a product, now we're left with useless crap in the kernel

Presumably deleting code is not very hard if it is unmaintained or a burden.

> Why can't these companies just build their own modules? Why is it everyone else's problem?

They're not upstreaming this so their own internal dev lives are easier. They'd rather just keep using whatever development repo they already are without dealing with upstream reviews and requirements. They were upstreaming this so that everyone could have support for the hardware upon release.

And, to that end, "corporations" upstreaming high quality support for their hardware, as intel has been doing, benefits linux. Throwing shade at them for preparing day-1 support for hardware they ended up canceling seems counter-intuitive.