You’re right that there are many drivers and people from manufacturers responsible for hardware families, but there still needs to be a maintainer for the subsystem as a whole.
That person reviews what the manufacturers and other contributors send in, to validate that things are still compatible where they touch in the kernel, and that the code is good enough. They then prep the commits of the subsystem for inclusion into the next kernel version and pass that to Linus, is my understanding.
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 4 days ago
One maintainer, multiple supported devices