Exactly. It is not abuse to honestly review a patch or an idea, and block its progress pointing out serious deficiencies. This is just a way to assert quality, and apparently it is a very effective way - we do trust Linux.
You are not the code you write. Accept the critical comments and improve.
Honesty is not abuse. But abuse is often misrepresented as honesty, and intolerance of abuse is often misrepresented as an inability to accept useful criticism.
Anyone who is actually concerned about honesty should be able to recognize the existence of abuse and draw a clear distinction between the two. But if every time abuse is brought up, you pretend that honesty was brought up, accuse the speaker of attacking honesty and mount a defense of honesty without ever acknowledging the existence of abuse, then it is clear that you simply reclassify all instances of abuse as honesty, and are really defending abuse. As a heuristic rule of thumb, that's a strong indicator that you are yourself a habitual abuser, because other people don't have much reason to defend abuse.
Everyone screws up from time to time, but it takes faulty rationalizations to keep screwing up in the face of criticism. If you see a lot of feedback which indicates you are behaving harmfully to others, your first conclusion should not be that the people giving this feedback are against honesty and criticism. You should ask yourself why you so often seem to run afoul of this kind of feedback, and why you are so defensive about it. Attacking people for saying "this thing you do is harmful" is an indication that you yourself are not good at taking criticism.
And, considering consequences, it's probably even more important to be able to take criticism on doing active harm to others than to take criticism on the importance of garbage collection.
You have a valid point. It is, indeed, possible and often quite easy to misclassify abuse as criticism. However, I disagree with this part:
> Considering consequences, it's probably even more important to be able to take criticism on doing active harm to others than to take criticism on the importance of garbage collection.
All three major operating systems, this is Windows, Mac OS and Linux, all have or had leaders (Gates, Jobs, Torvalds) that on numerous occasions proved themselves to be harsh and very open about their criticism. One might want to say - they were/are class-A assholes. What we want to believe is one thing, but the recent history of major operating systems disagrees with your point of view.
You are not the code you write. Accept the critical comments and improve.