That is my understanding from the outside as well. The core question here should, I think, be whether the adoption and spread of clearer semantics via Rust is worth the potential for confusion and misunderstandings at the boundaries between C and Rust. From the article it appears that this specific instance actually resulted in identifying issues in the usage of the C api's here that are geting scrutiny and fixes as a result. That would indicate the introduction of Rust is causing the trend line to go in the correct direction in at least this instance.

That's been largely my experience of RIIR over years of work in numerous contexts: attempting to encode invariants in the type system results in identifying semantic issues. over and over.

edit to add: and I'm not talking about compilation failures so much as design problems. when the meaning of a value is overloaded, or when there's a "you must do Y after X and never before" and then you can't write equivalent code in all cases, and so on. "but what does this mean?" becomes the question to answer.