Famous man whose last impactful work was decades ago and spent years on meta's sinking metaverse boat said so, so it must be true.

Can't help laughing at a random ad hominem against John Carmack of all people, and about his opinion on a guy who is already widely regarded as an especially talented programmer.

I don't think that's fair. There's a lot of talent and grit behind ffmpeg. But for better or worse, getting the code to do what it's supposed to do requires a different mindset than getting it to not do anything else (i.e., to handle malicious inputs correctly).

The developers of ffmpeg are very good at the first thing and not very good at the second. But few people on this planet, if instructed to write a complex video format parser in C or assembly, can produce something that's secure on the first try. The main failing of the ffmpeg team is that they should have spent more time on architectural hardening and mitigations. Most other large projects of this type do.

So who is someone who's opinion is worth anything to you?

Except yourself, presumably, to me it almost seems nobody is perfect.