Yes, we know. We get it. Rust is not an absolute guarantee of safety and doesn’t protect us from all the bugs. This is obvious and well-known to anyone actually using Rust.
At this point, the argument feels like some sort of ideological debate happening outside the realm of actually getting work done. It feels like any time someone says that Rust defends against certain types of safety errors, someone feels obligated to pop out of the background and remind everyone that it doesn’t protect against every code safety issue.
I think it's all part of the language maturing process. Give it time, zealots will either move on to something new (and then harass the rust community for not meeting their new standard of excellence) or simmer down and get to work.
There's a clear safety spectrum, with C near the bottom and Rust near the top. It's tedious for people to keep saying "well it's not right at the top so we should just keep using C".
I'm sure pro-seatbelt people were called "zealots" back in the day too.
I think that is untrue. I worked at the Network Systems arm of Bell Labs for sixteen years, and we could demonstrate five-nines of uptime on complex systems written entirely in C.
C is a rough tool, I will grant you that, and Rust is a welcome addition to the toolkit, but saying that most code written in C is horribly unsafe, does not make it true.
https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf
So not even back then.