I like doing dangerous things for fun too. (See also: my 50 mph scooter.)

I think we should mitigate risk in serious software in many holistic ways such as formal verification, fuzzing, anomaly detection, good/defensive coding standards, code reviews, and so forth. Such can be accomplished in C, but it maybe easier in languages such as Rust. The advantage of C is ubiquitous portability, which is necessary for widely-used libraries.

Sure, it’s important for a library to have C source code for portability. That doesn’t exclude implementing the code in another language (such as F*/FStar or Dafny) that has stronger out-of-the-box safety guarantees, then compiling it to portable C source code for distribution.

You're right there's a lot of tools out there to help with writing secure code in C. I suppose I feel safer knowing Rust enforces some memory safey, but that isn't guaranteed either -- you could just use unsafe{} blocks everywhere.

I don’t think many people begrudge people who ride horses for fun or write security software in assembly for fun.