This assumes that people only use Rust for the performance. I don't think that's strictly true.

95% of what I write isn't performance-critical or even, really, performance-relevant. I still choose Rust for the vast majority of projects for ergonomic and correctness reasons.

You're spot on. I recently chose Rust over Python for a very small program which reads a JSON (or Hjson) file, does some checking and processing, and writes the results to a different JSON file, because Rust has serde, proper static type checking, algebraic data types, and other features that made it more productive than Python (!!!) for that specific use case. Performance wasn't even a consideration, I made judicious use of clone() and run it in debug mode.

Serde is such an awesome library. Having to decode serialized data in the other languages (Swift, C++, Python) I write is such a bear after using serde.

Swift comes closest with codable/decodable but it's often still lacking the ergonomics of serde, especially the attribute options per field

Some people who come to rest may not be fine with it.

A lot of people come to rust for other reasons, like compile time safety checks etc...

But most importantly, the delta between the performance of block_on and not, versus block_on and Python are massively different. You can write inefficient rust and still have a huge win over Python.