But why wouldn't have happened with Rust? Sorry I can't find anything about Rust in the article. Or you mean if the Linux kernel was written in Rust and that stupid bool coercion was not possible?
It's the latter; Rust won't allow the int->bool coercion.
Though to be absolutely pedantic, !x is an int for x:int in C, there is no bool coercion involved; an if-statement takes an expression of any scalar value and evals to true on non-zero. Not that that helps to avoid introducing bugs anyway.
