30 years ago I’m sure there was the equivalent of people who exclusively worked in assembly who thought the same about C programmers

Isn’t it exactly the point Linus was making about Rust?

Bringing 2 languages into the kernel does create a divide that can come with a maintenance burden

There are already 2 languages in the kernel: C and Assembly(for example).

should be properly addressed and argued with pros/cons

That already happened and Linus decided to accept Rust code into the kernel.

don’t bring new languages into the kernel

Didn’t the guy who decides on bringing new languages to the kernel(that’s not Christoph Hellwig) specifically said “do bring Rust to the kernel”? And bringing it to the drivers not core subsystems is exactly because C developers won’t need to maintain it?