Well, there are lots of replacements for common commands like "ls", "grep", "find", even "cd", and some of them are pretty popular. And there is a wide variety of shells and terminals. No one is complaining about them and the worst you get is "I don't care/not my cup of tea" attitude.
Of course the key idea is to keep compatibility with existing world, for example by choosing a new command name ("rg"? "ack"?). If you just take over the existing name that has been used for years and break existing scripts, people will be unhappy.
I like pointing out that millions of lines of code in the Linux kernel have no real memory exhaustion strategy beyond randomly killing a process. Those are millions of lines of code, few of which are reusable, and they do so very little.
