> Could it be mitigated by safer, modern tech?

Like... Coverity Scan?

In my experience, this bug looks like a classic example for something that Coverity should find.

And it looks like sudo is already on there: https://scan.coverity.com/projects/sudo

The last analysis was 2 weeks ago. I wonder if this CVE is among the outstanding memory corruption and illegal access defects (5 each).