I encourage people to try writing run of the mill blocking code with Rust instead of diving immediately into futures and thread pools and streams just as if you were writing run of the mill Python.
It's generally 1:1 equivalent to the code I would've written in another language.
It's a general purpose programming language where most of the learning curve is in more advanced topics like concurrency, streams, and how to multiplex over thread pools. You can ignore them at the start, just like you can in Python.
What is Rust's niche? What excites me about it is that it is becoming a general purpose ecosystem. A few libs are missing, but that's changing rapidly.