It offers me so many of the joys of Go with more power. Some negatives too of course, but a big boon for me in learning Rust was realizing i didn't always have to reach for the biggest tool. Sometimes a simple Clone or [A]rc was perfectly okay, especially when comparing it to Go - my benchmark.

Rust became as developer efficient for me as Go was, and then more so when i leveraged the huge surplus of code locality tools like Iterators and various functional patterns (.map, etc).

Plus, now i get to play with new toys like WASM without a GC or game engines! I miss almost nothing from Go and gained so much power when i want to reach for things. Most of which, like Iterators, are power with little to no cost.

I've been a Rust fanatic for a couple years now, and C/C++ were not even in my toolbox. I think Rust can hit a lot of sweet spots for a very very wide range of people, eg non-C/C++ domains. Which isn't an argument for its usage, but an explanation for its popularity.