Fundamentally there is no difference. In practice Rust makes things a lot worse. It encourages the use of dependencies from random (i.e. published with cargo) sources without much quality control. It is really a supply chain disaster to happen. A problem like this would propagate much faster. Here the threat actor had to work hard to get his library updated in distributions and at each step there was a chance that this is detected. Now think about a Rust package automatically pulling in transitively 100s of crates. Sure, a distribution can later figure out what was affected and push upgrades to all the packages. But fundamentally, we should minimize dependencies and we should have quality control at each level (and ideally we should not run code at build time). Cargo goes into the full opposite direction. Rust got this wrong.

And Alpine Linux is largely a mistake.