I’m not saying that rewriting he backend is a good choice, but for me specifically, I’d like Lemmy to be written in Java. Why? I’m a Java software engineer for nearly 7 years now and I’d like to contribute. Yes, I could learn Rust, like I did learn Go, C, C++ and other languages during my cs studies. But I really don’t have the free time and motivation to do that after I already worked 8-10 hours at my computer. If I could use my existing Java knowledge to quickly fix some small bugs or whatever, I’d love to do that. But the hurdle to learn a new language (including other paradigms and best practices) just to contribute to this one project is just too high for me.
As wgbirne already said, the admin has more important real life stuff to do unfortunately. If I understood it correctly, the lack of storage also killed the database, leaving it in an inconsistent state. In addition to that there seems to be an issue with the backups so no easy rollback and probably a lot of manual fixing needed.