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That assumes the correct number of ASN.1 parsers in the kernel is "1". I would strictly prefer my kernel to include "0" (zero, nil, none) ASN.1 parsers. It's a trash spec designed by committee that probably needs its own bytecode machine to be parsed safely (that certainly is the track record of ASN.1 parsers in the wild).

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How would you suggest that the kernel interoperates with systems that need ASN.1 such as X.509 encryption, CIFS filesystems, or BER encoding in the H.323 ITU standard?

For example, by having a userspace helper for it. Pretty similar to the same way that the kernel itself doesn't do firmware patching, but relies on userspace to handle the opaque blobs.

Firmware patching happens rarely, but decoding packets in the firewall would be far slower and more fragile if it required calling out to a userspace process.

I think there was a recent kefuffle in the python community because they wanted to depend on a Rust library to parse ASN.1 and some more obscure platforms weren't ready for that change.

Not in core Python, but in a widely-used library, yes. https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/issues/5771

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