Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hubris and people thinking they can safely code in memory unsafe languages (they can't)
A memory-safe language could have easily resulted in the same vulnerability. In this context, “memory-safe” means it does bounds checking on an array when you try to access an element. But the webp code does bounds checks up-front so that array accesses can be non-checked, to help performance. (If they didn’t want this performance, they could have easily used a std::vector and used bounds-checked access.) The vulnera…
This is a big presumption. Yes, it could happen. In practice, doing this isn't even the first tool you'd reach for in this circumstance; the compiler can and will eliminate duplicate bounds checks, so if you've hoisted it early, you shouldn't be using unchecked accesses, even if you care about performance, until you've demonstrated why the compiler isn't okay with removing them. The extra ceremony ("unsafe { foo.get_unchecked(n) {" vs "foo[n]") makes this even simpler to catch in code review.