> It feels like an almost deliberate crippling of progress by diverting top talent into useless avenues, much like string theory in physics, or SLS/Artemis.

You don't have to be a "top talent" to rewrite old unix utilities. The hard part is writing it safely, which in Rust can be done without "top talent."

And then you end up with code 17 times slower than the C code it is replacing. When it didn't need replacing in the first place.