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I think what he means with historically is before ASLR, DEP, and other mitigations, where a buffer overflow meant you can simply overwrite the return pointer at ESP, jump to the stack and run any shellcode. Mitigations have made exploitation much, much more complex nowadays. See for example https://github.com/stong/how-to-exploit-a-double-free
This case is easy — no need to rewrite, they've just removed accidental support for exotic formats.
Apart from Rust, Wuffs is also a good candidate for codecs: https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/wuffs-the-lang...
Too bad that Swift isn't that good for low-level codecs, so a Swift rewrite of Messages couldn't remove C dependencies.
Pointer authentication cannot protect against all pointer substitutions, because doing so to arbitrary C++ code would violate language guarantees. https://github.com/apple/llvm-project/blob/next/clang/docs/P... is a good overview of which things can and can’t be signed because of standards compliance.