Nonsense.

An architecture is superior for a given purpose, or judged by a particular standard. There isn't some magic score card which can declare an architecture to be plainly superior.

HURD will be clean. Plan9 was clean (and I have a fondness for it). I also prototype some logic in Haskell but know full well why most production code isn't written in it.

Linux is a bit of a mess. So is BSD. So is every general purpose operating system that has ever been fielded for a significant period. The warts come from being adapted to serve many different purposes, and working around many real world problems that clean-room architecture gets to just ignore. And getting some of it wrong and only fixing some of it halfway because it turns out that in real deployments (not just "the market"), clean isn't the most important thing people need from an OS.

Building a fresh OS, even over two decades, is impressive. Most Slashdotters couldn't do it. But, seriously, many research OS's have been written and shelved since HURD was started, and none of them have run around insisting they were the second coming. HURD has some neat ideas. But it's getting mocked because it's been presented with the kind of pretension and arrogance you only get away with if you deliver perfectly and on time.

This is an old problem in high assurance systems. As other posters have pointed out, as some point you have to trust someone. But you can still "trust but verify".

The standard solution is "division of privilege". Over time folks have learned that the key is a system which audits everything the admin does, and the one thing the admin can't do is modify or delete the audit trail. A separate person or team has the role of auditor.

This is one of the requirements of a B2 level system in the old Orange Book model, and you'll see if it as a requirement if you need to provide systems for most countries' military or intelligence organizations. It's rarely used elsewhere because more or less noone else is willing to pay the staffing costs. The solution there is trust someone, and be ready to fire, sue, and/or prosecute if they violate that trust.

If she had broken and entered, destroyed some property, changed locks, sabotaged, say, manufacturing systems so they would need repair before normal business operations could continue, and falsified documents (fraud), you think she would have gotten a _smaller_ sentence?