This is the reason why Rust will never go mainstream. People say "You can get the same performance and features as C++ with unsafe!", but as happens in every language such hacks gets ostracized by the community and therefore basically unusable. So instead we just write our code in C++ which is unsafe by default so nobody complains.
Nothing whatsoever was "ostracized" in this case. A fix was provided for code that could cause UB in some cases, the former maintainer rejected the fix as "boring" and denied that a problem existed. This could have happened just as easily in C or C++ code.
