A tiny mouse, a hacker.
It’s about 5 times longer than previous releases were maintained for, and is an experiment. If there’s a need for a longer term support branch, there will be one. It’s pointless to start maintaining an 5+ year branch with 0 users and a handful of volunteers, none of whom are paid for doing the maintenance.
So yes, in that context, 15 months is long.
A lot of people do. Especially on GitHub, where you can just browse a random repository, find a file you want to change, hit the edit button, and edit it right there in the browser (it does the forking for you behind the scenes). For people unfamiliar with git, that’s huge.
It’s also a great boon when you don’t want to clone the repo locally! For example, when I’m on a slow, metered connection, I have no desire to spend 10+ minutes (and half of my data cap) for a repo to clone, just so I can fix a typo. With the web editor, I can accomplish the same thing with very little network traffic, in about 1 minute.
While normally I prefer the comfort of my Emacs, there are situations where a workflow that happens entirely in the browser is simply more practical.
Sadly, that’s not code Linus wrote. Nor one he merged. (It’s from git, copied from rsync, committed by Junio)