https://lwn.net/Articles/343828/ describes Alan Cox trying to fix the TTY layer, being trashed by Linus, and removing himself from the maintainer page.

I find it hard to call this a "scathing rebuke:"

https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/373

It also didn't just happen out of the blue. It's also true that Alan had already been working on the kernel for 15 years, was an employee of RedHat at the time, and his Wife's health was starting to fail.

If you follow the thread it goes back and forth across quite a few messages with frustration building on both sides with Alan ultimately deciding to step away from a single (and very hairy) subsystem.