Arguably less bad than silently corrupting your data and forcing you to do CAPTCHA everywhere.
Which is what the parallel Perl(?) component was doing at the time.
Rust solution gave a clear signal something was wrong, the other solution was slowly annoying everyone and pushing them away.
And the Rust wasn't the root cause but corrupt configs were being erroneusly duplicated.
In any case, I largely tend to agree with you that this is better in most scenarios (not for the cloudflare incident though). But a segfault in C for a null pointer dereference would have exactly the same result, which is why null pointer dereferences are a terribly example if you want to show the advantages of Rust.
The only example I know where I think Rust clearly has a real advantage are lifetimes.