I guess my take is that I'd rather assume this is exploitable in the wild until sufficient time has passed. Would be cool to see clippy pick up on this bug in older versions!
This bug wouldn't be nearly as interesting if it "just" resulted in a memory leak. Memory leaks aren't considered unsafe in Rust because they can't result in UB in the same way as e.g., OOB writes. In fact, there are APIs accessible in safe Rust which explicitly leak memory! [0]
This bug is effectively a use-after-free, which is definitely something that the Rust compiler should catch.
> Would be cool to see clippy pick up on this bug in older versions!
No need for that. A future version of the Rust compiler that incorporates a fix should reject the incorrect code, so all you'd need to do is compile older code with that new compiler.
It is, but safe Rust merely makes it hard to do by accident. Leaking is not "memory unsafe" because is does not currupt anything, so it's legal.