Ted's post is quite balanced and accurate vs the revisionist fawning in the quoted message from McVoy. But Warner's message elsewhere in the thread is also good http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-May/009880.html.

The biggest Linux defect was not ext{2,3,4} but LVM and MD, which would throw away write barriers until something like kernel 2.6.31 (which was especially painful on Ubuntu LTS). Many distros used LVM by default, and many servers used mdraid somewhere in the stack. I saw many corrupt Linux systems in the 2000s through the first part of this decade.. it was especially egregious for DBs and hypervisors with file based disk images.