You did. You just won't accept it because you don't want to. Every time you try to draw the focus of the conversation to "it's a process study" you're trying to diminish the severity of what the researchers did here.

How was this study conducted? For every patch that the researchers sent, what process did it go through?

The answer is, it was reviewed and accepted by a human. That's it. Full stop. There's your human subject right there in the middle of your research work. It's not possible to conduct this research without that human subject interacting with your research materials. You do not get to discount that human participation because "Oh well we COULD replace them with an AI in the future". Well your study didn't, which means it needs to go through the human subjects review process.

When you claim that this study was about a process, you're literally taking the researchers side. That's what they've been insisting on as the reason why this study is ethical and they did not need to inform or obtain consent from the kernel development team. That's the excuse they used to get out of IRB's review process so they can be considered "not a human subjects research". That's the excuse they needed so they can proceed without having to get a signed consent form. They did all of this so they could conduct a penetration test without the organization they were attacking knowing about it.

You don't seem to be able to comprehend why or how the maintainers feel deceived here, or that their feelings are legitimate. If you did, you wouldn't keep banging on about "oh this is just a process study, the people don't matter, it's all isolated from humans". Funny enough, the people who DID interact with this research DID feel they mattered and DID feel deceived. The whole point of IRB was to prevent exactly this; researchers conducting unethical research which would only come to light after the study concluded and the injured parties complained (and deceit IS a form of harm). For research which is supposed to be isolated from humans and thus didn't see the need in obtaining a signed consent form, that's not really the outcome you expect to see if everything was on the up and up. Another form of harm from this study, the maintainers now have to go over everything they submitted again to ensure there's nothing else to be worried about. That's a lot of wasted man hours and definitely constitutes harm as well. All of University of Minnesota now has less access to the project after getting banned, even more collateral damage and harm caused to their own institution.

Let's be honest. If the researchers were able to sneak their code into a stable, or distribution version of the kernel, they'd be praising themselves to high heaven. Look at how significant our results were, we fucked up all of Linux! Only reason they didn't is because at least they can recognize that would be going a step too far. They're just looking for excuses to not get punished at this point. Same with the IRB. The IRB is now trying to wiggle out of the situation by insisting everything is ok. The IRB is also made up of professors who have a reputation to maintain! They know they let something through that should never have been approved in it's current form. Most human subject research NEVER get this kind of blowback and the fact that this one did means they screwed up and they know it.

No ethics review board considers a multi page, multi forum, lengthy discussion on the ethics of a study they approved as a good sign. Honestly, any study that gets this much attention would be considered a huge success in any other situation.