The code would have failed because you can't use an uninitialized variable, so you would have had to set it to a default. You don't just get random garbage from the stack.

It would have forced you to either specify a default or fail pretty loudly as soon as you launched the game, both much better than leaving a bug there just for it to resurface 20 years later.

Most popular languages would prevent this. In this case it’s as simple as having more sensible reader API than sscanf in standard library and forcing variables to be initialized.

Of course not, but this here was a memory access error and rust would have prevented this.

You didn't actually understand what the post is about. Maybe read it again.