> Funding bodies should consider spending money on boring maintenance and reimplementation of critical infrastructure in languages safer than C (e.g. Rust, but there are other interesting alternatives).

And here's where it all breaks down - the most vocal proponents of how the money should be used would be those who want to see a particular tech stack survive/grow.

The way it is right now, being far from ideal, is better than having the loudest activists picking the winners.