> Why did Linus make such fanfare about his departure
I'm not sure he did. AFAICT he wrote an email on the Linux mailing explaining that he was taking some time off and why. He also did an interview or two, presumably because he was asked.
He probably realised that a portion of the internet would go bananas but that's not entirely his doing.
"To tie this all back to the actual 4.19-rc4 release (no, really, this
_is_ related!) I actually think that 4.19 is looking fairly good,
things have gotten to the "calm" period of the release cycle, and I've
talked to Greg to ask him if he'd mind finishing up 4.19 for me, so
that I can take a break, and try to at least fix my own behavior."
If Linus asked Greg to "finish 4.19 for him", it's predictable that he'd be back for 4.20.
Because this was the first time in the history of linux this happened (a non-LTS release that wasn't by Linus himself) and Linus also wanted to take this as an opportunity to apologize for his behavior. Linux is a huge and very important project, so I'm not surprised this deal was a big deal and had a lot of coverage in HN or reddit.
Why did Linus make such fanfare about his departure if it was always intended to be so short?