He meant nothing "less worse" than C. And linux is not written in C, but in gcc extended C.
Plain C is already way too complex and rich, not on the absurd and grotesque level of c++ though: integer promotion, typedef, enum, switch should go (_generic too ofc), only one loop keyword (loop{}) should stay, no anonymous code block, only explicit compile time and runtime type casts (except maybe from/to void* and literals), explicit compile-time constant (don't rely on compiler optimization), primitive types should be sized (u8/s8/../u64/s64/f64 or ub/sb../uq/sq/fq), properly define preprocessor variable argument macros (the optional ','), well I think people get the idea.
Plain C is already way too complex and rich, not on the absurd and grotesque level of c++ though: integer promotion, typedef, enum, switch should go (_generic too ofc), only one loop keyword (loop{}) should stay, no anonymous code block, only explicit compile time and runtime type casts (except maybe from/to void* and literals), explicit compile-time constant (don't rely on compiler optimization), primitive types should be sized (u8/s8/../u64/s64/f64 or ub/sb../uq/sq/fq), properly define preprocessor variable argument macros (the optional ','), well I think people get the idea.