> I don't think these rewrites will ever be mainstream.

Forever is a long time. And there's always a huge appetite amongst smart young developers to create their own ecosystem. After all, you don't become Linus Torvalds by contributing to linux. You become linus torvalds by creating your own operating system from scratch.

Whether or not new implementations become valuable and get maintained over time is an open question. But the energy is definitely there. (Even though its not necessarily pointed in the direction of economically useful, long lived software.)

> typically ports focus on the 90% that is easy to write and neglect the remaining 10%.

I hear a claim like: "The current C version of most tools is the only place, and only project which will ever bother solving its chosen problem properly." I'm not sure if tahts quite what you mean, but its a wildly bold claim. Even in C and C++, this seems already false. There's several good, solid, standards compliant SQL databases. And OS kernels. And compilers. And web browsers. If there's room for several C based OS kernels, do you really think there'll never be a viable OS kernel in rust, Zig or Odin? Or a web browser or compiler?