They aren't a counterpoint at all. They're confirmation. Security-wise legacy operating systems (Linux, NT, ...) suck. New security vulnerabilities are discovered every week and month in them to the point that nobody actually considers these "multi-user systems" any more and obviously every box hooked up to the internet better be getting patches really frequently.

For the record I said manageable not great or perfect.

Every (popular) modern operating system sits on decades old foundations written in C that can't just be replaced, so that's not a particularly strong argument.

It's noteworthy that Google is financing the effort to bring Rust to the Linux kernel, that Microsoft is also investing in the language and that there are newer, production usage focused operating systems written in Rust. (eg Hubris [1])

[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris

Redox is probably a better example than Hubris:

https://www.redox-os.org/

Hubris is intended to run on microcontrollers in a very low-level context (e.g. no display), so is very unlikely become a desktop / user-facing OS.

(I work at Oxide, mostly writing Hubris code)