I figured that articles like folklore are like an amusing movie file (say someone chopping a skin of a watermelon) that's repeatedly being passed around reddit.
"Seems like a waste of effort" in a vacuum yes, but
1 - GNU utilities is ancient crufty #IFDEF'd C that's been in maintenance mode for decades. You want code to handle quirks of Tru64 and Ultrix? You got it.
2 - Waving your hands around 'the community will take care of it' is magical thinking. C developers don't grow on trees. C tooling is kinda weird and doesn't resemble anything modern - good luck finding enough VOLUNTEER C developers to make your goals happen.
you're just an end user, you don't have to maintain the suite.
In OSS every hour of volunteer time is precious Manna from heaven, flavored with unicorn tears. So any way to remove Toil and introduce automation is gold.
Rust's strict compiler and an appropriate test suite guarantees a level of correctness far beyond C. There's less onus on the reviewer to ensure everything still works as expected when reviewing a pull request.
there were crematoriums falling apart because of constant use. Morgues overflowing with coffins.
Three of my direct coworkers died from covid. One guy didn't get his sense of taste back for a year.
People just gasping to death in their bedrooms waiting for things to improve and only going to the overloaded ER when it's too late.
I'm an asthmatic, I've been close to that feeling where sub 90% oxygen saturation made me feel like death. Anything like 80% your lungs start to fail. You're dead in a hurry.
I interviewed with them prior to the SAP acquisition back in 2017.
"We're looking for someone with experience with ASP and database performance improvements."
"You mean, ASP.net - not old school VB6 derived, interpreted - 'pretty cool for 1997' Active Server Pages - ASP?"
"Hey hey! You're the guy we want!"
Of course I would have taken the job if I'd known they'd be acquired.
edit: Huh, they were acquired in 2014? Ah well - it's like someone's MVP that made it out to production, then they made it big and that MVP kept being glommed onto.
FWIW - last stage where the binary is produced takes the longest and is single threaded and that's the largest difference between release and debug.