What is a C/C++ programmer? I've written fairly large amounts of C/C++ over the course of my career and I continue to do so. I totally concur with this and am eager to see Rust take its place over time.
We have a stream cipher based proposal, but it's a much bigger change and needs much more review, so it can't be landed for P. A drop-in replacement for AES is a much simpler change to make.
The headline should be "Ashur advocates that it is better that a device be unencrypted, than encrypted with Speck". Ashur argues for that position and you can read his reasoning in detail in the above link, but that's the question you want to be thinking about when thinking about this.
It's worth bearing in mind that it's poorer people and people in poorer countries who don't have AES-supporting hardware, and are currently without encryption as a result.
See ebiggers' comment above - ChaCha20 isn't on its own suitable for disk encryption. We need something that is a drop-in replacement for AES to use in XTS mode.
Right, exactly as Eliezer says. There are plenty of examples in all four quadrants, so as a way of working out how near a technology is, this works less well than you'd like.