edit: silly observation: the general Rust practice of using immutable bindings by default and not leaking shadowing bindings out of blocks would have made the bug I think I found less likely.
What you seem to think is a defense of C is accidentally just providing ammunition to the "rewrite it in Rust" crusade that I'm guessing you're very much not a fan of. There are very solid arguments against rewriting everything in Rust, and you're arguably doing more harm than good by making a counterproductive one.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the bug is kernel code accessing out-of-bounds memory in an array. That would 100% not segfault in normal Rust code.
> The relevant kernel code would probably be marked "unsafe" with or without the bug.
I mean, sure, if you remove the safety rails that prevent you from running off the side of the cliff, then you will in practice likely ending up running off the cliff. If you have to explicitly do that though, it still makes it a lot more obvious that this is a risk than if you refuse to have safety rails anyway for any purpose.