People like to harp on software written in C, and often for very good reasons. A vocal minority of those then whip out their calling card, "should have used Rust!"

As a result, there is a sentiment in the peanut gallery that "memory safe language == Rust".

You are correct in that a segfault in a project written in memory safe language gets more scrutiny. But imagine for a moment what would have happened if the compiler guaranteed that those Valgrind-caught memory access violations could not have occurred in the first place?

We got lucky, and the developers who wrote the actual backdoor were sloppy. They were aiming for sneakiness and evasion first, memory correctness would have likely been an afterthought. The next group tasked with a similar approach will know better.