The article is interesting and the solution great but saying it is safer because Rust is misleading. I wrote a Rust milter for Postfix incorrectly and although it didn't crash as such, it completely didn't work because data was coming into it from outside. i.e. it is still possible to write broken code in Rust.
I've personally never considered nginx unsafe either but tbh, I am not exactly an nginx guru on the cutting edge of performance or load.