I think most of us enamoured with rust are c++ refugees glad the pain is lessened. The tooling including the compiler errors really are great though. I like the simplicity of c, but I would still pick rust for any new project just for the crates and knowing I'll never have to debug a segfault. I like pytorch and matlab fine for prototyping. Not much use for in-between languages like go or c# but I like the ergonomics of them just fine. I don't think it is at all weird for people coming from c++ or even c to like rust and prefer it over those other languages. We have already paid the cost of admission, and it comes with real benefits.
For me, programming with C++ was like building castles out of sand. I could never make them tall enough before they would collapse under their own weight.
But with Rust, I leveled up my abilities and built a program larger than I ever thought possible. And for that I'm thankful to Rust for being a language that actually makes sense to me.
> You could see similar behavioural issues with C++ back in the days
I think that it's happened to some degree for almost every computer programming language for a whiles now - first was the C guys enamoured with their NOT Pascal/Fortran/ASM, then came the C++ guys, then Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript/Node, Go, and now Rust.
The vibe coding people seem to be the ones that are usurping Rust's fan boi noise at the moment - every other blog is telling people how great the tool is, or how terrible it is.
My gut feeling says that there's a fair bit of Stockholm Syndrome involved in the attachments people form with Rust.
You could see similar behavioral issues with C++ back in the days, but Rust takes it to another level.