Wouldn't you prefer to have the computer deal with the personal paranoia for you?
I love C dearly, but I can write so much faster in, say, Python, and that code is usually production-suitable. If I say "for line in open(sys.argv[1])", I don't have to spend 50 lines dealing with open() failing, or sys.argv() being the wrong length, or allocating a buffer to read into and recombining lines longer than the buffer, or whatever. Ideally in Python I'd print better error messages, but it's fine if I forget; Python will take care of each of those problems and do something safe, if not user-friendly. If I forget any of those in C, it's emphatically not fine.
Rust - and many other higher-level compiled languages! - promise to bring that development speed and confidence back to the domains where C dominates.
That's why the spurred interest in C and C++ in providing more safety mechanisms, which I believe is because of the increased competition in this realm from Rust, is a good thing. If we can get most the way to what Rust provides in C and C++ through tooling and extensions, there's a path for existing source that can't or shouldn't be rewritten, and new projects get to make a choice of what they want to use.
Sure, but I would argue that there's much more interest in it now that there's a credible alternative that does care about it. That is, it existed, and people used it, but now people might feel a little bit of a need to justify why they are using C or C++ when then didn't before, and so their confirmation bias might cause them to look more into those existing safety mechanisms, and maybe even use them.
Put another way, even if Rust were to disappear tomorrow, I think the net impact would have been very positive in that it exposed people to these concepts in a concrete way they weren't before, because they are optional in the C and C++ ecosystem.
I love C dearly, but I can write so much faster in, say, Python, and that code is usually production-suitable. If I say "for line in open(sys.argv[1])", I don't have to spend 50 lines dealing with open() failing, or sys.argv() being the wrong length, or allocating a buffer to read into and recombining lines longer than the buffer, or whatever. Ideally in Python I'd print better error messages, but it's fine if I forget; Python will take care of each of those problems and do something safe, if not user-friendly. If I forget any of those in C, it's emphatically not fine.
Rust - and many other higher-level compiled languages! - promise to bring that development speed and confidence back to the domains where C dominates.