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So they found and fixed 142 vulnerabilities in the last 3 years and folks are advocating for them to abandon all that good work and build a new framework from scratch which reintroduces tons more bugs that are completely undiscovered. Seems like an insane path to stability to me.

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You are missing the point. Nearly 100% of those bugs are due to the fact that it is written in a memory unsafe language, FFmpeg is 23 years old and we still find memory corruption bugs in it every few months. That's why people are saying to perhaps use a memory safe language instead, I don't understand why people give this such a hostile response, it has been widely accepted that C is dangerous and can not ever be made safe, to suggest anything different is denying reality.

A lot of it is written in ASM for performance reasons.

Besides that, there's always a bunch of "this should be rewritten completely in <hot new language>" as if it's trivial to rewrite software like this from scratch but nobody ever steps up and does it, I wonder why that is?

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