You are right. You could. I've said as much numerous times in the past, but this doesn't unfortunately stop folks from saying that the performance difference is directly attributable to Rust. The performance difference is primarily attributable to algorithms.

I have, though, said in the past that I wouldn't have written ripgrep without Rust, which is a very different claim and is opinionated, and mostly a statement about developer productivity and maintenance burden. With Rust, it is very easy to keep ripgrep's trains running across Windows, macOS and Linux.