Not all delay is bad

IMO, it's definitely about pushing the conflict over Rust to later, but I don't think it's as simple as conflict avoidance. I'm sure that's a part of it—after all, if every maintainer quit all at once, it would definitely be very disruptive (not necessarily fatal—Linux is too important to the industry to just let it fail outright). If tweaking the rules to appease them solves the problem for now, great!

But another part of it could easily be to give Rust more time to prove its worth (or lack). For example, meaningful metrics on CVE/bug counts correlated to changes due to adding Rust (whether it's drivers being written in it or API correctness fixes/documentation to support it) would have a significant impact on the discussion. Or improvements in review bandwidth for maintainers that decide to embrace it, or the lack of that. Or coming through with better platform support and feature stabilization (or not).

It's okay to delay arguments if doing so gives everyone better information & circumstances and doesn't make things substantially worse in the meantime. It's avoidance for the sake of it while letting things get worse (the typical situation) that's bad.