Right, can you imagine telling the higher ups "Sorry, we can't use Linux like our competitors because Linus Torvalds is a brilliant jerk and he swears at contributors sometimes which is harmful to inclusivity"? Yeah right. Most FOSS users don't say boo to the maintainers of the software they are using, let alone contribute.
But many large companies, like Brendan's, _do_ contribute to large projects that they use. To successfully adopt big pieces of OSS infrastructure, large companies often want some assurance that their bug fixes, performance improvements, and possibly feature additions can be upstreamed without too much pain.
It's hard to get brilliant jerks to accept new ideas. It's hard to motivate your engineers to invest deeply in toxic, unfriendly ecosystems. Of course, extreme technical success can outweigh many of these factors, but that's the exception and not the rule.
What any sensible company wants is that their changes get upstreamed, but changes that they don't care about from other sources (such as other such companies) do not.
Someone who can work with toxic and unfriendly upstream anyway has an advantage; they are able to get stuff into a project that is stable because it loudly rejects crap and fluff.
A corporation doesn't care about toxic and unfriendly; that just describes their world, pretty much.
If I'm dealing with some external project as part of company work, that's the situation in which I least care about people's personalities. I represent a company, not some individual and his fragile ego. I might be in charge of upstreaming something that doesn't even have my own name on it.
In business you have cutthroat competitors who unfairly bad-mouth your product.
You have irate, rude customers.
You may have suppliers to whom you are a low priority because their volume is elsewhere.
Your HR doesn't control any of those external people. You have to be cool as a cucumber, or it behooves you to be so.
