You are committing a logical fallacy. I'm not "the voice of HN", nor am I a representative sample of "what HN thinks".

This is just my opinion.

Using a builtin operation ("addition and comparison of integers") is always safer than using a function that may or may not work the same everywhere. I.e. a nonstandard function.

Also, the proposed code has more levels of indirection, therefore places a higher cognitive load on the reader. These things tend to result in bugs down the road.

And it is also true that "an overflow could still happen", which is mentioned in Linus' critique.

All of these are objective ways to measure how "safe" the code is.