While I understand both points of view, I'm leaning towards yours, because:

- John Carmack embedded a C compiler and interpreter/runtime into Quake back in the mid 1990s as a scripting language! It was that efficient that it could be used in a real time 3D shooter. That's a solo effort as a minor component of a much larger piece of software.

- I've seen university CS courses hand out "implement a C compiler" as a homework / project exercise for students. It's not particularly difficult.

Sure, a modern C compiler like GCC has to handle inline assembly, various extensions, pragmas, intrinsics, etc... but like you said, all of those are thoroughly documented and have open source implementations to reference.

Similarly, the Rust compiler is implemented in Rust and could be used as an idiomatic reference for a generic compiler framework with input handling, parsing, intermediate representations, and so forth.