The safety can be worth it in certain cases. Like when handling untrusted input. And it's not just Rust: look at WUFFS for example. WUFFS can actually rival handwritten implementations in certain cases.

Are video codecs in the present day able to be sandboxed? In my fantasies at least I’d like the worst a malicious video file can do is cause garbage output or cause the codec to crash.

Forgive the ignorance, I have worked entirely in the abstracted layers of the stack, and mostly web.

but not these cases