It's not a conspiracy theory to imagine that IBM's vision for Linux compared to 2000s or 2010s era Linux is opaque, complicated, and enterprisey. It's who they are.

The grandparent comment

Linux community is so inherently meritocratic that one can’t meaningfully force anything upon any large group of them.

Is pure fantasy. Software projects are dictatorships of those willing to put in the work, not meritocracies. There is nothing immoral or wrong about this but we should be realists. The entire software ecosystem is dominated by oft shitty good enough solutions which people poured enough work into to solve problems well enough.