Given last week’s stories about Rust and the Linux kernel, this almost feels like a pointed message from Google’s devs to the Linux kernel devs.

Nit: One engineer at a company saying something is not the same as that whole company saying something. I wish they would just say "Google employee insists..."

Make sense. Firmware is also extra difficult to debug so it's nice to use a language that significantly reduces the amount of debugging you need to do.

I want to see specific examples of serious bugs that rust would catch that clang -Weverything, clazy/clang-tidy and scan-build would not find for C++... because I'm still not convinced it is anywhere near worth learning at all for career/veteran C and C++ folks.

Maybe but at this point any thing google suggests is a signpost to do the opposite