See also this talk by Bryan Cantrill, “Scale by the Bay 2018: Rust and Other Interesting Things” https://youtu.be/2wZ1pCpJUIM where he talks about software platform values, in the sense of what different programming languages and other things focus on. He also touches on the fact that while higher level layers in the stack might value security it kind of falls apart when the very microcode in our CPUs sacrifices security for performance.
This was in a period of time where Spectre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabil... and Meltdown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabi... had reared their ugly heads.
There surely is actual engineering but it's scattered unevenly across companies. It's funny that Crowdstrike did fuzz their code but didn't even check for correct arity. I think that the Cybersecurity industry isn't such a strong adopter of sophisticated engineering techniques as for instance in Web development where new testing techniques evolve every few years.
Having said that, writing ring 0 drivers an unsafe language sounds like an invitation to disaster. That's what went wrong with CrowdStrike. You don't need any testing to avoid crashing the OS when given a bad virus definition file. (Making the virus definition file do something useful... sure, you're gonna need tests for that.)