[stouset]

This reads like “I’m not sure what’s the point of power tools if every now and then you need to reach for a plain old hammer or screwdriver”.

What’s the point of high-level languages at all if they’re just going to be implemented on top of a CPU that will happily chase raw pointers and divide by zero if you ask it to?

Because everything else can be expressed safely and more concisely than writing it in C or raw asm. And you have to pay virtually zero abstraction costs for the pleasure: see Rust’s comparative performance in language shootouts. Not infrequently Rust even beats C’s performance due to better visibility for optimizations.

And when you do still have to resort to unsafe low-level bit twiddling, you get to keep all the other benefits of having a modern, powerful language.

Do you genuinely think the Linux kernel is just throwing Rust in to attract kids who just follow the latest programming fads?