Yes, to be clear I wasn't accusing Rust code of having this particular problem, I was just using it as an example of a modern language where in my opinion there's a bit of an over-emphasis on brevity in terms of writing the code, as opposed to reading/understanding it and maintaining it, which I feel for long-term large projects, I'm not convinced is a total win.

I could have easily used Go or Swift as examples instead.

And to be clear, these new languages are in general improving things a lot, but I just worry there's an over-emphasis on "being able to do a lot of complex stuff which very few syntax / characters", which I don't really fully agree with (at least for large complex long-term projects).

That's not to say I'm right, but in my experience of programming over 15 years in everything from ADA, C, C++ to Java and Python, at least on large projects, the speed at which code was created was very rarely that important. Getting it right, bug-free and performant was generally much more important. In some cases newer more-condensed syntax can definitely help, but in others, it can cause trouble.

I definitely agree with most of your points.

Code is read much more often than written, and most newer languages optimize for convenience rather than readability.

In my view Rust is actually pretty verbose compared to other new languages, and feels a bit cumbersome to write. Technically it could be made quite a bit leaner syntax-wise.

I just wanted to point out that Rust and the Rust community often share your view and want to optimize for readability as well. There actually was a lot of heated discussion last year around proposals that suggested reducing readability for convenience.