The kernel team has been at odds with the CVE process and the oss-security community about this stuff for many, many years now. It's a big part of why the kernel team established a CNA and started flooding CVE notifications; they don't believe that security problems are different than non-security problems, and refuse to establish norms or policies based on the idea that they are.
It's such a bizarre viewpoint. I wonder when Linus will see sense.
IMO it's pretty obviously not a view that they seriously hold, it's just one of those technical justifications people come up with to avoid admitting something they don't want to admit - in this case that Linux has a poor security track record.
> […] they don't believe that security problems are different than non-security problems, and refuse to establish norms or policies based on the idea that they are.
They believe there is no difference being able to get root and not being able to get root? It seems to me that to-be(-root) and not-to-be(-root) are quite different.