You are missing the whole point here. The kernel is a survival epic amongst millions of other failed projects. You don't get to tell the old captain and its lieutenants how to nail the planks and helm the ship when you just went pass the Titanic and Britannic wrecks because metal is so cool.
They're "old-school" because they have to be. Engineers will excrete their pet project and then leave and now they will have to support it. They are mean because that's the only "power" they have, as is explained in the post.
I'll leave you with this quote from "The Night Watch" by James Mickens (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf)
> This is not the world of the systems hacker. When you debug a distributed system or an OS kernel, you do it Texas-style. You gather some mean, stoic people, people who have seen things die, and you get some primitive tools, like a compass and a rucksack and a stick that’s pointed on one end, and you walk into the wilderness and you look for trouble, possibly while using chewing tobacco. As a systems hacker, you must be pre- pared to do savage things, unspeakable things, to kill runaway threads with your bare hands, to write directly to network ports using telnet and an old copy of an RFC that you found in the Vatican. When you debug systems code, there are no high- level debates about font choices and the best kind of turquoise, because this is the Old Testament, an angry and monochro- matic world, and it doesn’t matter whether your Arial is Bold or Condensed when people are covered in boils and pestilence and Egyptian pharaoh oppression. HCI people discover bugs by receiving a concerned email from their therapist. Systems people discover bugs by waking up and discovering that their first-born children are missing and “ETIMEDOUT ” has been written in blood on the wall. What is despair? I have known it—hear my song. Despair is when you’re debugging a kernel driver and you look at a mem- ory dump and you see that a pointer has a value of 7. THERE IS NO HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE THAT IS ALIGNED ON 7. Furthermore, 7 IS TOO SMALL AND ONLY EVIL CODE WOULD TRY TO ACCESS SMALL NUMBER MEMORY. Misaligned, small-number memory accesses have stolen decades from my life. The only things worse than misaligned, small-number memory accesses are accesses with aligned buf- fer pointers, but impossibly large buffer lengths. Nothing ruins a Friday at 5 P.M. faster than taking one last pass through the log file and discovering a word-aligned buffer address, but a buffer length of NUMBER OF ELECTRONS IN THE UNI- VERSE.