Also if people don't have a Rust toolchain setup, compiling the library and using it from source would be hard. In some cases integrating Rust in their toolchain could be hard.
Regarding metal and vulkan I will edit the article to mention Vulkan there too alongside metal. Thanks for your feedback.
As for toolchain, Rust can be set up basically anywhere llvm can, which is quite a lot. There are rare cases where llvm wasn't ported yet to, but I don't think they are enough to make C a compelling option in general, and I don't think any of them are gaming related.
If you are in such case - then sure, but otherwise, I'd still prefer Rust.
So if you do choose to make the implementation in another language, there are extra considerations that you have to take into account.
Why not write it in Rust, and provide C99 bindings? Using stock C for the actual library doesn't sound like a good idea to me, when today there are better alternatives.
And for sure avoid using Metal lock-in directly. Use Vulkan, which Apple should have supported from the beginning. For lock-in targets, there are translation options from Vulkan.