Sounds an awful lot like government welfare programs, don't it?
De Raadt is pointing out a phenomenon that every programmer has faced at one point or another: a choice of whether to re-architect and clean out the accumulated crap of a multitude of design decisions addressing different problems; or simply to work with what you've got, and work around the incompatibilities.
Open source stuff is exceptionally vulnerable to this, as by intent the open source designers are scattered hither and yon, making design decisions that first and foremost serve their own needs.
The re-architecting decision is really daunting, but eventually everybody ends up having to bite the bullet and do it. Linux is no exception. De Raadt undoubtedly has a personal agenda here, but I think he's probably correct about the need to clean things up.
Except that just anyone cant drop code into the Kernel, it get put in by a small group of core developers. The idea that some guy in topika just drops code into the kernel is a falkse one..