And more than that, he's right: if you care enough about things the kernel cares about, you really, really don't want C++ "idioms" in kernel. And you don't want to work with the people who don't understand that. So it's really convenient to piss such people off, just as he said:

"for something where efficiency was a primary objective the "advantages" of C++ is just a huge mistake. The fact that we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional advantage."

He delivers personally but Linux as a kernel is a pile of crap, mass duplication mdadm vs dm posix capabilities vs actual unretarded capabilities... Linus is good at coding but absolutely horrible at direction and that's exactly what Linux needs a direction for the better instead of evolution of substandard abstractions.