But I don't get that either: Parsing is today the least problem. The time you spend parsing is negligible (if you didn't mess up the language completely, of course) compared to the time for type-checking and optimizations.

Avoiding look-ahead (or especially the need to re-parse parts recursively) is a very good rule of thumb, sure. But when you need to decide whether you make the language simpler to read for the machine or more heavyweight for the human the answer should be absolute clear.

A modern compiler spends anyway most of its time in the semantic analysis (and depending on language, later optimizing the output). Optimizing the lexical part for the win of a few milliseconds on tens of thousands of lines just makes no sense. Today's computers are even fast enough to parse spoken human language fast enough. Again it's the analysis that takes time there.

The thing with Rust's syntax is especially annoying as almost everything else in that language makes a lot of sense. The concepts are neatly put together. It's explicit about the right things. It's considerably small and simple. It's almost a kind of sweet spot in language design, imho. And than it was hit hard with the ugly stick. That's a really sad point. And so needless.

I still hope they will come to their mind some day, and will start to offer a kind of "light" syntax at some point.

I really wish Rust could be more like Scala 3 on the outside, with a clean, minimal pythonic look & feel, and not like how someone put it before in a comment in this thread "When I look at Rust, all I see is `{};`". The later is also exactly my impression, sadly.