Yes
It did eventually work, but only after several rounds of reviews, and often dead-end investigations
sharifhsn on Hacker News
In the thread “Wedeo – a Rust Rewrite of FFmpeg”, replying to this comment
Helped: Directly inspecting and modifying the ground truth FFmpeg source code.
Got in the way: Frequent mistakes requiring constant reference back to the original implementation.
… I would constantly have it go and refer back to the ground truth FFmpeg source implementation. It did eventually work, but only after several rounds of reviews, and often dead-end investigations. Being able to directly inspect (and in some cases modify for extra debug output) FFmpeg at any given time was invaluable, and I doubt any rewrite would succeed without having that.