>helps that a 10kloc c program getting riir'd probably won't be a 10kloc rust program, because c doesn't have libraries and rust does.

What? Rust has so few libraries of significance that it still depends on C for security-critical areas like SSL.

>it is literally impossible to write "a small codebase focused on its key value-adds without distractions" in a language that doesn't have strings and requires you to build a dictionary from scratch

Strings are misunderstood, I'm not going to get into it here. My dictionaries in C usually clock in at about two dozen lines of code. The complexity doesn't go away because your language does it for you.