Yes, there's this whole attitude of "black-boxiness" to these types of arguments that I find troubling; that it is simply the nature of the machine to be unpred

Yes, there's this whole attitude of "black-boxiness" to these types of arguments that I find troubling; that it is simply the nature of the machine to be unpredictable, and that therefore the safest and best code is the code with the most mileage on it, and every time you poke it you compromise the integrity of the system as whole. (It's a close cousin to the "don't rewrite it" argument we've all heard via Spolsky et. al., even though they've ended up rewriting their shit several times over). There is a fundamental shift forward in the types of guarantees you can make with the premises of a language like Rust vs. that of C that I have simply never heard one of these demagogues address.