That 2019 blog post explains how, having made a whole series of mistakes, they're now going to rewrite everything in C and it'll go much better. The next blog post says they've abandoned the project instead.

To me, it seems like they'd lost motivation years previously and were increasingly flailing around for something that would spark the same joy as initial work on an exciting new project, and Rust has little to do with that.

Lots of crates exist which wrap popular C libraries, and they don't seem to run into the sort of misery you describe.