> Critical infrastructure still written in C ... is technical debt that is only going to get worse over time.

No. Rust is not magic, it just forces a discipline in which certain safety checks can be made automatically (or are obviated entirely). In other languages like C, the programmer needs to perform those checks; and it's technical debt if the C code is not coded carefully and reviewed for such issues. If coding is careful and the code is review - there is no technical debt, or perhaps I should say no more than the unsafe parts of a rust codebase or the standard libraries. And the safety of critical infra code written in C gets _better_ over time, as such technical debt is repaid.

> Rust is explicitly designed to be what you'd get if you were to re-create C knowing what we know now about language design and code safety.

That's not true. First, it's not a well-defined statement, since "what we know now" about language design is, as it has always been, a matter of debate and a variety of opinions. But even regardless of that - C was a language with certain design choices and aesthetics. Rust does not at _all_ share those choices - even if you tack on "and it must be safe". For example: Rust is much richer language - in syntax, primitive types, and standard library - than C was intended to be.