Your perspective makes more sense when you put it that way.
I think it’s important to understand that “having to learn Rust” is a proxy for “having to learn, become proficient in, become expert in, commit to regularly using, and take on the additional work of managing bindings between a large continually changing codebase and Rust, with no foreseeable end”. Multiply that by the number of kernel developers who would be affected, and remember that Rust in particular is famously time-consuming and (at least for some) often painful to use.
It’s not, “I don’t want to learn this”. (The people maintaining the kernel surely learn new things all the time in the course of their work, after all, as do most advanced programmers.) It’s more like, “I cannot reasonably take on such an enormous additional workload.”
The Rust camp in this disagreement doesn’t seem to grasp that yet. If everyone involved figures out a way to bridge that gap, I expect the frustrations will go away.