> what will it take to move away from c? older devs retiring.

I'll take forking and porting, thank goodness for LLMs.

It will indeed take everyone dying, but it's not because of developers being afraid of change. In large part, it's because of people like you who make Rust insufferable. Rust is the only language I have antipathy for, because of its community. No other programming language broadly has people who make it their life's mission to tell other programmers they're programming wrong because of their choice of language. When your arguments for why they're wrong are also vapid, eg. "C is bad because of an insane developer committed a logic bug that blatantly violates a trivially-written spec" when an insane developer could just as easily write Rust code that violates the spec, it reinforces that there is no reason to switch.

Rust is a fad among HN-types. It is not used in the real world. You see logic errors reported in C/++ because 99.99% of the world's system code is written in it. The only reason you don't see headlines about logic errors in Rust is because nobody uses Rust in production code. Rust certainly does not prevent you from producing the most dogshit software imaginable, eg. https://jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4 , which is far worse than any C/++ database anybody uses.

Moving away from C in any POSIX system is in fact stop being POSIX system as POSIX and linux being unix like system is built on standard that is defined as C library specification.

Rewriting it to Rust is fine attempt, just hard to call it is unix/posix anymore. It may not matter but semantically true.