I love that Rust has become a successful systems language with memory safety. And while I use many of these "coreutils replacements" frequently, they are mostly not equivalent to the originals, and I think it's disingenuous to claim that they are.

They aren't drop-in replacements, but I think "equivalents" is fair.

Your existing bash scripts don't work in an alternate universe where computers come with ripgrep not grep, but that universe isn't very different otherwise. Some things are a little easier to do, some things are a little harder to do, there are different bugs than in our universe, but it's way less strange than a universe where Lisp Machines still dominate, or even one where the Network uses X.25 rather than IP.

I think https://github.com/uutils/coreutils is aiming to provide drop-in replacements.

Good luck getting Google to fund that one particular go, heh. Even if they do fund Mozilla.

See also https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/