Do you have the quote? I would think such "right to merge" would go against the notion that maintainers work for free and have no obligation to merge your work.
Edit: Found the quote. The Right to Merge is about the maintainers right to merge your fork/changes back to their branch. Not the other way where random dev have a right for their changes to be merged into the original project
Yep, it's his right to merge other people's work that were derived from Linux, not the right of other people to get their stuff merged