Of course i've read it, but what does that have to do with anything.
The kernel is not exactly the bastion of clean maintainable code, despite Linus's opinions.
Nobody complaining about C++ has yet come onto the GCC mailing list and explained, in clear concrete terms with examples, how they could make GCC more maintainable using C than it would be using C++.
Instead they sit on LWN and kibitz from afar.