Programming is a human activity and will remain so for the foreseeable future afaics. I've had a taste of the approach to development required to get good performance in GC'ed languages and it wouldn't surprise me if it's just incompatible with the way most system programmers think. And if that's the case it's a real problem for that approach and I doubt funerals will help it unless there's a concrete reason for later generations of the kinds of developers needed for kernel development to think differently. "You can't get memory safety without GC so they'll be forced to learn" no longer applies (if it ever did) thanks to rust.
As proven by them being draged to write Swift and Java/Kotlin code on mobile devices, or the way WASM is being pushed into CNCF projects, a little steering with more painful alternatives if they keep to their old ways, helps a lot.
By contrast newer generations don't think C and Assembly is the only way to program a mobile device, or embedded system, see MicroPyton and JavaScript in the maker community among school kids.
