Why are Leela's fans so passionate? The neural-network engine Leela is a relatively new one. It's also got some extremely passionate fans. For example they write things like this:


  Wait 5-6 months, and we will see SF8 on uber-duper logarithmic in cores Elo-wise 32 cores being smashed by Lc0 on my puny single 1060.


Watching Leela's fans argue up and down Talkchess, Chess.com's computer championship chat and TCEC chat, about how their engine is / isn't superior to Stockfish because of [multitude of factors] or how their engine is going to crush Stockfish after the next learning rate drop, about how the "end of an era" is at hand, etc, makes me wonder: why are Leela's fans so passionate? 

I don't recall seeing anything similar to this before Leela showed up. It's not like Leela is so special either: before Leela showed up, Stockfish, Komodo and Houdini dominated engine chess, and there were periods when any of the three were the strongest engine. But I don't recall seeing any of their fans displaying the same level of intensity.
You can't really objectively answer this question, but I'll share my view.

One of the important factors to take into account is that Leela Chess Zero project requires tremendous computational resources to complete. The way project attains those resources is by convincing large number of people to donate part of their machine time to that project.

To make this work, project needs to sustain strong community that clearly sees its goals, ideas and progress. There have been done many things for that: there is a very active discord chat, google groups, blog, you can see lots of graphs and metrics regarding project status, there are very detailed spreadsheets, etc. Also some chess youtubers helped this project grow community (e.g. KingsCrusher and ChessNetwork) by featuring it in their videos.

Beating StockFish is one of the very important goals of this community.

When people are united around some idea, it's because they are passionate about it. The behavior you are describing looks the same as when people argue about politics, football, religion, nationality, etc.