If you always keep praying to the same old bit of code to "reliably" chug along (which people clearly cannot actually ascertain, otherwise these reimplementations wouldn't be struggling), you're forever just rolling the dice that some Pandora's box will simply never open (which it absolutely does and keeps opening), while also giving up on modern capabilities. What you see as old reliable, I see as a buried lede. I'd imagine these folks see the same. [0]
It's frustrating to see the software world contend with the same pushback and counter-arguments the infra/ops world (my neck of the woods) has already figured out and went past long ago during the advent of IaC. Cattle > pets, easily, every time.
[0] It's also not a cost-benefit thing, but clearly a principled decision, so arguments that aim to contend the ROI of it all are off-base from the get-go. If ROI is the key thing for you, then all this philosophical nonsense shouldn't even be on the table. Calculate.
I do agree that the second system effect is real, it’s just that the balance of benefits and drawbacks significantly shifted when it comes to “rewrite in Rust” (not limited to Rust though).
Isn't it a bit early to make predictions on the future of computer security and how we create good software based on something that's been out for 2 weeks?
Meanwhile the C version of coreutils has been in development for 36 years. There's no rush.