It seems fairly common for a small number of prominent members of some community to move on to a new technology and have a number of people follow them for various (good and probably not good) reasons.

I'm not that familiar with Rails or Rust, but Steve Klabnik (http://www.rustforrubyists.com/) and Yehuda Katz come to mind in this case (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/12/12/Core-Team.html).