The argument was "I don't want to learn Rust, I'm not going to learn Rust, and if you put a non-C language in the codebase, I'm going to break it without giving a shit". Not sensible in the least.
I heard more like: "We have been borking like this for 26 years now and the result is amazing. If you want to introduce a new API for a couple of eventual use cases, you are welcome to do so, but don't event think to impose any additional burden on us."