C has not aged well, despite its popularity in many applications. I’m grateful for the incredible body of work that kernel developers have assembled over the decades, but there are some very useful aspects of rust that might help alleviate some of the hurdles that aspiring contributors face. This was not a push by rust evangelists, but an attempt to enable modernization efforts at least for new driver development. If it doesn’t work out, that’s fair enough but I’m grateful for the willingness - especially of Linus - to try something new.
I wouldn’t recommend Docker for a production environment either, but there are plenty of container-based solutions that use OCI compatible images just fine and they are very widely used in production. Having said that, plenty of people run docker images in a homelab setting and they work fine. I don’t like running rootful containers under a system daemon, but calling it a giant mess doesn’t seem fair in my experience.