DJB wrote Qmail, then abandoned it like an unwanted child. He might be a good programmer, but he's a really bad maintainer.

OpenSSL was all but abandoned as well. At least now there's a lot of attention being focused on making it better and more maintainable.

There's numerous tire fires out there: ImageMagick, OpenSSL, some Linux kernel drivers, and other projects people just take for granted without pitching in to help fix things.

Re-writing in Rust is a form of helping, and maybe in the process we'll find bugs in the originals or wholesale replace them with something better.