Linux

including some of Rust’s better ideas than to throw it away

The problem is that you can't just tack Rust's ideas onto an existing language. Generics, traits, lifetimes, borrowing, sum types, and match are key Rust features, but took considerable design time before Rust even reached 1.0. They interlock to produce a pleasant development experience. You can't just attached them to C and call it a day.

I don’t think Rust is wholly bad, to be clear, but it seems over-engineered to me, and the fact its useful new features don’t even completely work (see rust-cve) isn’t very encouraging.

Most of the CVE's listed there are in unsafe code in the standard library. At some point, some code is going to have to have to implement the tricky cases. In C, this code is common place, ready for any coder to run into problems. In Rust, these are bizarre edge cases that most people would never trigger.

I haven't heard Jonathan Blow's take yet, but one thing a person pointed out is that he tends to prefer a style that uses a lot of shared state. Rust explicitly discourages that style, considering it a source of bugs.

I encourage you to give Rust a try. It never hurts to have another language in your arsenal. Who knows, you might even find it fun.