I think it's an understandable prior. Historically, "low level stuff" was near-exclusively (see my comment below about OCaml...) written in unsafe languages. Even if that wasn't always literally required, it sometimes was, and so thinking this is the case was a reasonable thing to think.

It is only relatively recently that we have gained more realistic options in these spaces, and so not fully understanding the implications, or preferring the historically normal choices, is understandable.