Even Torvalds said that a lot of critical parts of the kernel are completely undocumented and only one or two devs know how they work. IMO that’s completely unacceptable, especially for such an important OS. They’ve proven they don’t want to collaborate or communicate how they work to others.

Rust encodes a LOT of things into the type system, which makes it far, far easier to maintain since you don’t need docs, and since the compiler enforces these things automatically. Memory safety is only one of them.

Starting something in a modern language instead of one with so little safety is a massively important feature.