I didn’t get involved with any of this stuff until mid-2013, but at the very least by then, it was well understood that Servo couldn’t reach its potential without Rust.
> Rust began as a personal project in 2006 by Mozilla Research employee Graydon Hoare, named after the group of fungi that are "over-engineered for survival". Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009, and would employ a dozen engineers to work on it full time over the next ten years
So by 2013 it was already 7 years old. I very much doubt the original personal project was viewed as "a lot of sense" etc.
You’ll always easily find plenty of people that will say “that makes no sense”. But of people that worked in these sorts of fields, I imagine that, from the very start, there would have been significantly more than average approval for its goals, even if you wouldn’t expect it to succeed (such endeavours normally don’t). The niche Rust was targeting from the very beginning was one that was known to be underserved, and known to be rather important.
