It's all things at once.

It's good that the world has thrown enormous resources into finding curl bugs, and found not very much. Most of the CVEs are low priority and in the more esoteric parts of curl. Some (like CVE-2026-9080) seem so obscure, I'm doubtful anyone other than the reporters have ever experienced it. That shows that curl was already pretty good to begin with.

This is ultimately a marketing piece for Aisle, but at least they did some public good to get their marketing.

The most important part is that these researchers were respectful of the maintainers, and spent their own time and money fully verifying their findings before raising them with the project. They have taken on board the message that the curl project won't even talk to slop flingers. The less diligent researchers, the Dunning-Krugerands who feel enabled by AI but actually just waste the maintainers time, are the real problem.