As a counterexample, .NET suffers a lot from the lack of evangelism - big chunk of community that started out back in .net framework days still thinks of it as poorly as people outside the ecosystem because they never bothered to drop old and obsolete tools and targets and give new versions a proper try (as the code is often vastly simplified and performance is vastly better).
Other programming languages, not only Rust, also do better at self promotion - take for example Go that managed to convince everyone to put it in the same bucket as Rust (which, personally, I find absolutely insulting as C# is a much closer alternative to Rust both in performance, features and access to low-level bits).
