If you want empiricism try academic papers instead of mailing lists ;) Some numbers: most critical bugs in the Linux kernel are due to memory safety: 40 out of 65 bugs allowing for code execution found in Linux in 2017 could have been prevented by using a memory-safe language [0]. The paper is about Go, but the same logic applies for Rust. Fun fact: 39 out of these 40 bugs were in drivers [1], so I think starting with drivers in Rust is a good idea.
If you want empiricism try academic papers instead of mailing lists ;) Some numbers: most critical bugs in the Linux kernel are due to memory safety: 40 out of 65 bugs allowing for code execution found in Linux in 2017 could have been prevented by using a memory-safe language [0]. The paper is about Go, but the same logic applies for Rust. Fun fact: 39 out of these 40 bugs were in drivers [1], so I think starting with drivers in Rust is a good idea.
[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/cutler (really good read!)
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.06344.pdf (disclaimer: I'm a co-author of that paper)