I was thinking of the public clash in 2025 between Christoph Hellwig which lead to the resignation of Hector Martin, lead of the Asahi Linux project.

It looks like later, in December 2025, Rust was officially moved from experimental to official: https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

I think what Linus pushed back on was specifically "social media brigading" as a solution to internal issues: https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292