My point is more that many rust programmers like rust because it’s an ML not because of the borrow checker. Most cli apps / web services are probably better off with a high performance managed runtime (go & swift are good examples of imperative languages that have successfully made similar tradeoffs).

There do of course exist many important use cases where a better c++ is actually what you want, and the complexity tax of that is worth paying.

Not when one looks it from the perspective from Xerox PARC, ETHZ, DEC/Olivetti, Microsoft Research, Apple on systems programming.

Sure, you can cherry-pick your perspective to fit your needs.