

I think the issues is that you can’t pick and choose exactly what you want in your new vehicle. You can’t say, get just a simple AM/FM radio and get bluetooth. You buy a package of accessories.
This was a Toyota RAV 4 IIRC and despite the vehicle having no subscription to this thing, it occupied the right hand side of the infotainment system and was prominent in the menus too. I had the car for nearly a month and I played around in the settings but saw no way of getting rid of it.
I don’t really buy the “small incompatibilities” argument. The project strives for total compatibility, even down to the most esoteric parameter that nobody has ever heard of. And even that seems like overkill to me - there are alternative implementations of core commands on Linux and other *nix systems like BSD, Solaris etc. where the compatibility is way worse. For example, busybox is used in embedded Linux, and a containerized images like Alpine Linux.
It also seems a bit rich to complain that uutils might get extended. GNU coreutils came into being because of dissatisfaction with the commands that came with the default *nix. Same for bash (vs sh), GNU cc (vs cc), GNU emacs (vs emacs) and so on. Was there somebody back then complaining about devs “spamming commits” that extended functionality?
And other Rust applications won’t only work with uutils. That’s absurd. They’ll test the capabilities of the OS they’re built to run on either at build time with feature flags or at runtime by probing commands. Just like any other high level application.
As for license, MIT is used for plenty other things in a typical Linux dist, e.g. X11.
The biggest point of concern for a Rust rewrite is dependency integrity. Rust uses cargo to manage dependencies and absolutely everything in the Cargo.toml/Cargo.lock files has to be reviewed. The crates.io repository is beginning to support package signing and The Update Framework initiative but every single dependency of uutils would need to be carefully reviewed and signature validated for it to be considered trustworthy. Basically everything needs to get locked down, and wherever possible dependencies expunged altogether.