The thing that has changed is that there are spaces where security is being taken more seriously, and C's memory unsafety became a deal breaker there. I do think that providing a mechanism to run existing C software that isn't performance sensitive in a way that mitigates its limitations is very worthwhile.

I think the "static analysis" and the "runtime checks" approaches are complementary, not in opposition, making any noise around having to choose one or the other moot.