But on the other hand you can’t expect some smaller and smaller subset of the population to primarily just learn C and meet the criteria of a kernel dev.

I absolutely agree with all your points, and most rust devs would agree, but the general idea is that over time that energy (which would have been spent tweaking malloc and such) should be spent on the rust compiler and memory management systems, which is already magic as someone who as written a lot of c, c++, and spent the better part of a year learning rust. (I’m no expert of course, but I have a pretty decent grasp on the low level memory management of both the Linux kernel and the rust compiler).

So that over time the effort that would be spent on memory management and kernel functionality can be properly divided. Rust not being efficient somewhere in catching memory faults or managing memory? Fix it. Someone writing unsafe rust code? Fix it.

I think at the end of the day everyone wants the same thing which is a memory safe kernel, and I think that rust Is being shoehorned into kernel projects too early in places where it shouldn’t be, but I also think there is unnatural resistance to it just because it’s different elsewhere to "how it's always been done."