You know what would definitively prove whether it would? Just do it!

I'm so tired of these "rewrite in rust" articles that have no code behind them. Spend the time and write a replacement for curl, ship it, and people will start using it instead of curl. In some years time, you can write a paper showing how many vulns your replacement had vs. rust. curl continues to be written in C because it has someone actually doing the work to write and update it. A theoretical rust replacement does not exist because no one is doing the hard work of writing and maintaining it.

It's like LibreSSL vs OpenSSL. Did LibreSSL end up being more secure? At least we can find out instead of just guessing about whether removing crappy code from OpenSSL would be a good idea.