It's a offhand remark in a post that's not about any of this. You're going out of your way to interpret this small thing in the worst, flame-inviting way.
Which supposes a different way to interpret this. Feel free to provide a different interpretation or this very short and straightforward sentence, and I'll definitely consider it.
Also, to be clear, I'm not positing that the author intends to cause the stated effect, I'm stating that the meme does this by it's nature, and the meme is also self-propagating by its nature and this same effect. The wording I used (that you quote) can be interpreted assigning intent to the author, which was not my goal, so I've changed them slightly.
(I would note the change with a note on the original, but I think these comments are sufficient to document it).
I don't have to interpret it at all, it's not an important part of the post. And no interpretation requires some weird political swipe.
I feel any statement about about what a group of people are doing, especially when it can be taken derogatorily or dismissively, should be accurate, or at least with some basis provided. It was in the article, in my eyes it's fair game for criticism, even if the only criticism is that I wish people would pay attention to whether it's true, as the criticism in this case is.
If someone described C developers as "wild cards that think all our security concerns are overblown" I think a lot of C developers would feel rightly misrepresented.
> And no interpretation requires some weird political swipe.
I compared how the meme works to how memes in politics are working to divide, as I think that's the most obvious parallel that is easily visible to most people. Notice how I didn't promote one side over the other, as it's a common tactic in politics in general, but more visible at both extremes.
I really wish this would stop being repeated. At this point it's a meme that was rarely, if ever, actually accurate. People just repeat it because they've seen comments urging the use of Rust, and this leap is easy to make and justifies a bit more pushback.
It's not about "rewriting", it's about new projects. People are starting new projects that do the same thing as old ones all the time. What you actually see is a lot of Rust advocates trying to influence those people to use Rust instead of C or C++, so instead of yet another library implementation in C or C++, we have one in Rust.
If it's better than the prior implementation, it might be used. This part has nothing to do with language, and better implementations come along all the time and are adopted to some degree. For example, Nginx. I remember the days when your choice for an open source webserver that could scale was basically Apache (there were a few others, but generally weren't used for serious sites).
Misrepresenting this cycle is just spreading FUD that activates a constituency to circle wagons. It's not helping anyone (as we're seeing from both sides of the political spectrum, which have gone all-in on this tactic lately).