It's just that I work in an adjacent area. It's not so much a question of security but of legacy, history, and performance. When Palo Alto was founded, 2005, I think C/C++ would basically be the only choice for these sorts of quasi-embedded/realtime high performance security applications. Then once you've built some sort of ecosystem around a certain technology introducing new technologies becomes harder.
Yes, I was imagining something like this for the "too new" alternative.
In 2005 you did already have safer, capable, mature systems programming languages available, eg Ocaml, but for cultural reasons they were not often used in SV. And people were less educated about building secure software (goes double for enterprise security products).