Don't forget, banks still use cobol... Should be replaced... If only someone could!
Herein lies the issue for me: should existing projects switch because they are deemed to be gatekeeping when in fact either they are fine with their technology choices or they have not the resources or knowledge to change but they aren't gatekeeping. The external appearance is the same whichever reason might be the truth.
I don’t think anyone’s advocating for changing old projects just for the sake of accessibility, but if someone was able to contribute a change that increases accessibility while preserving functionality, then that’s fine.
It’s how a lot of major OSS projects have shifted to cmake from make or scons. Granted cmake isn’t a pinnacle of ease of use either but it’s much easier imho to reason about and integrate with various tooling like IDEs
the level of work needed to add a dependency in C+Make vs Rust+Cargo is huge.