Yes. For me, as someone who came to Rust from a non-C/++ background, the appeal of Rust to me is that I get powerful features like an ML-ish type system, iterators, functional programming toys, and more, while still getting C++ or even C-sized performant executables.

Rust to me feels like someone sat down to make a systems language that was actually aware of the last 40 years of programming language development. I don't have to sacrifice expressiveness for performance anymore.

The borrowing and reference safety mechanics are just an extra layer of worry-removal icing on what's already a pretty appealing cake.