Actix used to be the fastest (maybe still is? all the frameworks are so fast it doesn't even matter that much anymore) and most popular framework.
Then a bit of drama happened about the hard life of maintaining an OSS project with users criticising you (the usual).
Rocket seemed to gain popularity for a bit but then there was some drama with the maintainer disappearing / not releasing 0.5 for a long time.
Meanwhile, quietly, the guys who did tokio (the most popular async runtime) released axum, which is compatible with tower middlewares. So they had tons of features pretty early.
I switched from actix to axum around 0.4 and updates have been very sensible and kept improving the DX.
I think you’re a little understating what happened to the developer.
There was like 3 uses of “unsafe” and the developer was being systematically attacked and harassed by the rust community for months.
It wasn’t “a bit”, nor would I call it “the usual”. The rust subreddit and discord literally organized brigading and harassment campaigns against the dude.
Rocket seemed to gain popularity for a bit but then there was some drama with the maintainer disappearing / not releasing 0.5 for a long time.
Meanwhile, quietly, the guys who did tokio (the most popular async runtime) released axum, which is compatible with tower middlewares. So they had tons of features pretty early.
I switched from actix to axum around 0.4 and updates have been very sensible and kept improving the DX.
Nowadays Axum is at the top for downloads number: https://www.arewewebyet.org/topics/frameworks/