Doesn’t sound like a bad thing to evaluate the most obvious alternative to build confidence before officially pulling the plug.

The most obvious alternative would be Zig. I don't see any Swift adoption outside the Apple ecosystem.

Last time I checked, Zig was breaking it's stdlib, so it's not an alternative imo

The key requirement is memory safety, which would rule out Zig.

Swift adoption had been dead long before the actual announcement. It's likely Rust was being considered long before this two week experiment with LLMs.