Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers

I think they wrote the code more for the challenge of it than anything else. The final code doesn't seem to do more than the bare basics (which is probably enough for the author).

Plus, to port this to OpenRGB, you'd need to rewrite the code into C++ (ugly, old C-inspired C++, at that: https://github.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB/blob/master/CONTR...) which would take most of the joy out of it for me at least.

I don't think the style described in that doc is at all ugly. It's practical and simple. I say this as someone who spends a lot of time writing modern c++ and heavily using templates.

I thoroughly enjoy rust, but I doubt not being able to use it should be grounds for avoiding contributing to a project. Unless you are going to write async heavy code, libusb is pretty easy to use in C.