Yes, Torvalds is rude. There are people who convey the same message without using abusive words. There are people who left kernel development just because they did not like this attitude of Linus (for example Sarah Sharp).
Torvalds is not rude to all developers. He trusts a lot of developers and he does not tolerate when they make mistakes. He behaves rudely with certain companies that use PR or marketing techniques to not follow GPL. Think of nVidia with its binary only GPU driver and Intel's response for meltdown and spectre.