Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why rewrite coreutils in rust? TOCTOU isn't exact some new concept. Neither are https://owasp.org/Top10/2025/ (most of which a good web framework will prevent or migrate), and switching to rust (which as far as I know) won't bring you a safer web framework like django or rails.
I don't know their motivations but mine would be: 1. Rust is a much more pleasant language to work with. 2. You can improve the tools, adding new features, fixing UX paper cuts etc. You're probably thinking "you can improve the GNU versions!" and in theory sure. But in practice these sorts of tools are controlled by naysayers who want everything to stay as it was in the 80s. The sorts of people that only accept patch…
Regarding poor UX, it is difficult to dispute with that claim without a specific example. Note that a lot of the features we support are standardized by POSIX. Even if we dislike the behavior, it is better to comply with the standards so the programs don't behave differently than users expect. The sentence you quote isn't meant to put down users. These programs are often much more complex than meets the eye, and there are lots of common gotchas that people have run into (and will continue to do so) [1].
Of course we would love for these programs to be useful for everyone. However, feature requests are often incompatible with existing behavior, incompatible with other feature requests, or have existing functionality elsewhere. For those reasons we cannot accept every feature request.