Rust has an important advantage over many other languages: since Firefox now requires it, for most desktop distributions it becomes one of the "must have" languages, together with C and C++. That makes writing system software in Rust an easier sell. Also, IMO Rust sits between C and C++ in the programming language spectrum, so it should be more acceptable for C and C++ programmers than higher-level languages.
Rust isn't one of those languages you need to include in a distro. Binary rust is just so's and elf's. It has no runtime, so its compile once and run anywhere with a C linker.
Its development tools are spread like wildfire, but in part that is because of their isolation - you only need rustup to bootstrap your own local Rust ecosystem.
Compared to many other recent native languages, the lack of a runtime absolutely helps Rust in adoption.
