ESR seemed to target linux userland and GNU-toolchain/utilities in his description of Linux as a Bazaar, although not to the exclusion of the kernel.
I think it is plausible to describe the kernel as much more Cathedral-like, at least in parts where Linus is very strict about how components should be integrated. I can see where parent could have got this impression.
At the same time, there are parts of kernel that are bazaars. Virtualization/Hypervisor support is the area I'm most familiar with; the various hypervisor vendors basically crammed their paravirt calls and passthrough drivers in, without unifying the interface at all. Yes, Linus and others were very aggressive with maintaining the code quality, but less with the architecture. There are other areas of kernel (particular drivers), where we've seen similar situations.
Indeed, throughout this discussion it has become clear that you regard anything with a sense of design and some amount of quality control as a "Cathedral". If you want to discuss the benefits of design and quality control, that's a perfectly fine discussion to have, but it also seems to be completely orthogonal to the original discussion of cathedrals and bazaars, which was wholly focused on the development process.
In fact, I wonder if your arguments would be better focused on the concept of "craftsmanship" (or lack thereof) in programming...keeping in mind, of course, that both cathedral builders and bazaar artisans have historically had a notion of craftsmanship.