Is Linux really your go-to example? Linus is noted for his irrational hostility to C++. His complaints are proved silly or, at best, obsolete by the example of Serenity OS.

An example of a measure to make the language easier to adopt is to allow borrow violations to be made a warning when building in debug mode. All violations would need to be patched up before release anyway, so it does not change the language any, but the violations might be in code you will delete before that. Forcing borrow cleanliness in dead code before you can work on important code feels just spiteful.

People invent the most ridiculous objections, including that the compiler would not know what code to generate, or that it would split the language into two dialects. My conclusion is that the loudest Rust fans like that they are a select few, and don't want it adopted mainstream. They might win.