well, santaclaus wrote 'generics', not 'templates'. So presumably that means containers like std::vector, or std::unordered_map. Those are pretty easy to deal with.
C gives you very very little in the way of tools to create and manage abstraction. Some programmers love this and for some projects it may be appropriate.
But is a reason so many large native codebases go with C++. The language provides some pretty handy tools to manage code organization and complexity at that scale.
Yes. Be sure to jump straight into the most modern C++ practices and avoid thinking of it like C (with all its focus on non-type-safe pointer manipulations).
Other people have other opinions, of course. Care most about the opinion of your boss and team mates. If you show up with a C++ style far beyond what they are used to they will think you are a nut.
I'm going to say no, because C++ seems closer to Java at first but it's really not. You'll probably spend too much time learning about templates and its object system instead of learning to think in the things that make C and C++ unique—pointers, pointer arithmetic, explicit handling of error conditions, low-level control of memory, preprocessor, etc.
