I can't really do a "steel man" rebuttal because over the years Linus has argued against a language he calls C++, but which is a made up language invented for the purpose of hating it. A straw man, if you will. It is difficult and frankly not worth the trouble to try to rebut an argument that has never risen above the level of "crap", "broken", and "bullshit".
In the particular case of operator new, it's clear from his cumulative statements that Linus is unaware that the programmer provides global ::new, and can make it do whatever the hell he wants it to do. You can also just forbid it and use placement new everywhere.
To be fair, I think most C++ programmers are unaware of replacing global ::new and most don't know about placement new either (from what I've observed). I think lots of people who write library style code do (whether it be for boost, stl, or in their company) but outside of that most C++ devs are not library style devs and are a bit out of the loop on these topics.
Also, I agree with what you said early about RAII solving entire classes of issues that C (and C++ without RAII) has.
