There is a huge category of bugs related to sloppy fudge-factor-based programming. C++ has great tooling but it's a nightmare on an organizational scale. If I was building an engineering org and had no other alternative but C++ I would be in shambles worrying that no-one does anything horrible, no matter how good the engineers were.
I write C++ for my day job :)
We can easily fix tools and processes, we will never fix people. Sure, all languages allow to create bugs, but some orders of magnitude more then others.
> kernel is written in C and is the most successful/widely used piece of software
end every release finds bugs in filesystem drivers, and buffer overflows and security issues and breaks display drivers. Seriously think of all the things kernel developers could do if they didn't waste years of work on tracking invalid pointers and off-by-one errors. Over and over and over again.