PAC as implemented is stronger than shadow stacks, as it aims to provide CFI for more cases and not just function returns. Overwriting function pointers gives code execution under shadow stacks (which only protect return addresses) but is much more difficult to do so when the pointers are signed. Mobile platforms are very memory sensitive (one of the major reasons that MTE hasn't rolled out, for example) but I don't really see them wanting to adopt shadow stacks.
I can't really speak to your comments as you haven't posted many of them. I'm not here to prove you wrong but just to share my views on these mitigations. I'm not an expert by any means but I do get to think about these for work so I can usually do at least a quick once-over to try to figure out how effective they might be.
> Overwriting function pointers gives code execution under shadow stacks
As you are probably aware, there are two kinds of CFI - forward-edge and backward-edge. Forward-edge CFI prevents tampered function pointers, vtables and such from being invoked. Whereas backward-edge CFI protects does the same for return addresses. Clang's and MSVC's (CFG) implementations of CFI only provide forward-edge protection, hence the need for shadow stacks. Without hardware support, shadow stacks can not be prevented from tampered, which is why Intel (CET) and AMD added shadow stacks.
> Mobile platforms are very memory sensitive
Agreed. I'd guess this applies to embedded too. But all things considered, I do hold the opinion that language-level memory safety is being overplayed a lot.
I can't really speak to your comments as you haven't posted many of them. I'm not here to prove you wrong but just to share my views on these mitigations. I'm not an expert by any means but I do get to think about these for work so I can usually do at least a quick once-over to try to figure out how effective they might be.