>> I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not.
My best guess: It creates a small amount of work for a maintainer to review and merge. This is worthwhile if a new contributor is learning their way around, and getting new contributors is very important to an OSS project. To have a large company submitting a bunch of these is a distraction for maintainers who have better things to do than support someone trying to inflate their metrics.
It's true that it creates an overhead for maintainers. But, on the other hand, maybe Linux process needs to be improved to relief the maintainers from having to review every single patch.
Linux as a project is big enough, and if maintainers are the bottleneck, maybe it's time to have sub-maintainers to whom such tasks could be delegated.
See, this will just cause additional communication overhead for the maintainers, too. And for what benefit, just to accommodate the behavior we see here?
My best guess: It creates a small amount of work for a maintainer to review and merge. This is worthwhile if a new contributor is learning their way around, and getting new contributors is very important to an OSS project. To have a large company submitting a bunch of these is a distraction for maintainers who have better things to do than support someone trying to inflate their metrics.