I would be slightly more cynical and suggest that the easy tooling enables people prone to cheap chest-thumping to get into the language, when otherwise those types would probably wander somewhere else. The difficulty of the borrow checker will already create investment-induced loyalty[0], but if the first difficulty isn't even unique to the project, then the interesting difficulty doesn't have a chance to work.
Speaking, myself, as someone who likes Rust but wishes people would be more clear-eyed and less obnoxious about it.
[0] Someone remind me what the standard term for this is? You know, the thing where people get really emotionally invested in things where they've invested a lot of time and effort, like Vi or Emacs or Dark Souls?
I thought about trying to use "sunk cost", but I usually see it written as "sunk cost fallacy" and that's a (closely related, but) slightly different thing.
Speaking, myself, as someone who likes Rust but wishes people would be more clear-eyed and less obnoxious about it.
[0] Someone remind me what the standard term for this is? You know, the thing where people get really emotionally invested in things where they've invested a lot of time and effort, like Vi or Emacs or Dark Souls?