But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.

The uutils author knows this. His motivation was performance. It’s easier to write fast code in Rust for him.

The fact uutils are being shipped despite being so raw shows that this is not about better software. The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.

You are mashing two things into one.

1. uutils is just making Open Source software.
2. Canonical ships it despite the project being so raw.

uutils don’t have any rights to tell Canonical if and when can the software be incorporated into Ubuntu.