mindlessly chanting “tools”
That's what you were doing in the first place. Instead of evaluating and trying new things, you are putting them in an imaginary cycle, ignoring any actual value that they brings.
Also Rust has been on your "stage 2" for 10 years. It's now widely used in multiple mainstream operating systems for both components and drivers, driving part of the world's internet stack, and is used to build many of those "shiny and new tools".
Currently it's a long chain from an early version of GCC to the latest one, then mrustc (in C++) which can compile rustc 1.54.0.
I assume that you do know that tools improve objectively in the cycle and are making a joke on purpose.
Did they fixed the kernel panic problem that persisted in the last two versions? I don't dare to try it, last month their proprietary driver has almost destroyed my machine.
Because it gives the wrong impression that it is not proprietary, just like how you are making this exact mistake.
Nobody has mentioned that Guix is readily available on NixOS right now? Add a line to your config and it's ready to go. Compatible with everything else.
I'd say no. Programming safely requires non-trivial transformation in code and a radical change in style, which afaik cannot be easily done automated.
Do you think that there's any chance to convert from this to this? It requires understanding of the algorithm and a thorough rewrite. Automated tools can only generate the former one because it must not change C's crooked semantics.
Did you just assume that those languages exists since the dawn of computing? Or they run the world as long as they came to existence and were never "the new thing"? You are just contradicting yourself at this point to defend yourself from anything you don't want to accept.