As a potential alternative thought process I would add that kernel development sort of uses their own flavor of C that you also have to learn. While in case of a language with better abstraction powers, you can actually read a function and knowing only the language but not the project, could potentially contribute — as opposed to C, where I have to know this cryptic macro, and that by convention this and that struct has to be embedded x bytes into another struct so that it can be used with the linked list utilities made.

Also, simply by having god damn namespaces more readable names could be used at no downside.