I think the upside is that these utils are not set in stone and never updated. Future maintainers will probably find it easier to work on a more modern codebas

I think the upside is that these utils are not set in stone and never updated. Future maintainers will probably find it easier to work on a more modern codebase with more footgun protections. So, yes while the current utils is great, at some point the code will have to be modified and I would much rather modify clean Rust code than 30, 40, 50 year old super optimized C that no one truly understands anymore.