That wasn't my intention at all. I was challenging the narrative that serde has been one of the best things that happen to rust since sliced bread/borrow checking.
I'm gonna reuse a reply to a different comment because I feel it captures the gist of my opinion, and because the dtolnay drama was one point among many, and is again generating more emotional effort than it's worth:
But my point, is that his crates (and thus he) hold too much power, even if there had been 0 incidents. That's not his failure per-se, but it's rusts failure if a single person can hold this much power, and be involved with this many shit-storms, without someone stepping up and being like "maybe we should put the decisions for this essential infrasructure on more shoulders". Even if he was the rust messiah himself, I wouldn't be comfortable with a Bus factor of one, for something that "is often credited as a reason people reach for Rust."
We should stop putting serde on a pedestal and call it what it is, an ok serialization library, that falls short of the potential that rust has in that space.
We should also call syn by it's name. A lisp-style macro system to polyfill the shortcommings of rusts macros, that has become rusts de-facto macro system for anything that goes beyond the simplest declarative macros at 600.000.000 downloads.
No matter how you and I feel about the guy behind those things, it seems obvious to me that we should strive to replace serde with something better, and either replace the need for syn with a system for compile time introspection (I don't have high hopes for this anymore), or pave the cow paths and integrate the existing API into core (as a side effect also cutting down on compile times).