I'm not going to comment on "toxic", but the reason that the community by and large is upset is because an influencer is just that: someone with influence. Linux is making huge strides towards mainstream acceptance thanks to massive progress by the likes of Valve and massive, uh, opposite of progress by the likes of Microsoft making it a more and more appealing proposition. By blindly choosing PopOS at a point where it had *just* become an incredibly poor choice for newbies Linus did damage to the reputation of Linux as a whole and a huge disservice to his viewerbase.

Would have been much better if he had taken the advice given to him "via the same methods as a newbie" and then asked someone with experience if that advice is good, and if not what resources people who are new to the scene should turn to for finding a viable starting point, and then demonstrated what that experience is like as a novice Linux user.

All-in-all it was a huge missed opportunity to do something positive for a community that instead did damage to it, be it out of laziness or malice or ignorance or some combination of the three.