You are forgetting crates don't exist in isolation, rather they have a dependency graph, many times with overlapping nodes.

Those two minutes are actually around ten minutes to compile something like rustfmt, just because binary dependencies aren't supported.

My average C++ projects, mixed with Java or .NET code are the ones actually taking two minutes, on the same system.

Truth be told they would take much longer when compiling everything from scratch, but we never do, because we already have the binary libraries.

So it is a bit hard to sell Rust when the toolchain is slower than C++, which I am pretty confident it will certainly improve in any case.