This patch is miniscule, and does not deserve 'Kernel contributor' status, which seems to be what the OP is after, and which I don't think is warranted for this sort of thing.
IF the code someone writes deserves to be included in a project, they deserve to have their name attributed to that code. You acting like there is some threshold of code to submit before someone's authorship is recognized is weird.
When you submit a patch to LKML you propose a fix, and if your patch is properly formatted and cleanly merges without further changes then it may be included as is. Or it might be parked until that section gets worked on in a larger context. In no way should your expectation be that your submission will be included verbatim and that you will be registered in the gitlog unless the maintainer decides that it be so.
Note that you are talking about a project that is older than quite a few of the people on HN and that it pays off to know how such a project operates before attempting to contribute, more so if you plan to go nuclear about your expectations not being met.
Finally, and if you do go nuclear it helps if you don't materially misrepresent the interaction with the maintainer, who did not exactly ask for your contribution.
We don't have to discuss what might happen. We have a specific instance of something happening. In this case someone submitted a patch, the patch with a 1 line change ended up in the kernel. There is no need to talk about maybes, contexts, or what ifs. The kernel maintainer took someone else's code and put it in the kernel under their own name.
As a long-time OSS contributor and an active maintainer on a different OSS operating system, I can definitively state that the answer is: yes, it’s absolutely limiting.
They received a reported-by credit, which was more than sufficient — especially on a tiny patch that got rewritten.
The important work was identifying and reporting the issue, and they got credit for that.
By turning around and writing an angry blog post, they turned a non-issue into some seriously unpleasant drama. Nobody is going to particularly want to deal with them again.