' has a long history of use for various purposes in programming language syntax not derived from C.
In Ada, attributes are a single quote followed by the attribute name.
If I have an enum called Fruit then Fruit'First would give the first value in the Fruit enum definition.
http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22rm/html/RM-4-1-4.html
Attributes provide meta information about types and are very useful when working with custom integer types and ranges:
https://learn.adacore.com/courses/advanced-ada/parts/data_ty...
Using ' for Rust lifetimes or Ada attributes is just a sigil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming)
It is not too different from:
& for addresses / references in C, C++, and Rust,
* for dereferencing in C, C++, and Rust
$ for value substitution in shells and scripting languages
: to mark keywords in Clojure and some Lisps