Where is your extreme assessment coming from?

It isn't very extreme, in my opinion. I am only making one claim, and it's a rather modest one: Memory safety bugs aren't any different from other bugs.

The "you're holding it wrong" crowd has been claiming that memory safety bugs are a skill issue for ages now, and that the issue is overblown and can be solved by having programmers suck less.

Curl provides the counterexample to this. Its main developer seems to be quite skilled, as reiterated by the various AI audits it is a very solid codebase, yet it still suffers from memory safety vulnerabilities. If the "you're holding it wrong" crowd is right, we're faced with a contradiction. Is Curl secretly a poor-quality codebase which has managed to fool the community until now? Is Daniel Stenberg uniquely susceptible to writing memory safety bugs, negating his otherwise-seemingly-decent programming skills? Is he perhaps intentionally introducing memory safety bugs to make C look bad?

In other words: if memory safety bugs are indeed a different breed altogether and are completely avoidable if we try hard enough, why are they still hitting Curl?

I posit that they are not: if you are writing unsafe code, you will introduce memory safety bugs. You can avoid them altogether by switching to inherently-safe languages like Go or Kotlin, by catching them at compile time like Rust, or by catching them at runtime like Fil-C. Or you can ignore the problem altogether and keep writing C like we've been doing for decades, but that means you will keep shipping memory safety vulnerabilities - like we've been doing for decades.