Yeah, it's surprising. A lot of Python people are in the community too, such as Armin, the creator of Flask.

I can't speak for Rubyists, but I find it a very strong complementary skill to Python, as it allows for writing things that are impractical in Python. And Rust feels friendlier as a Python-complement than C. Especially parallel C.

Receiving a compiler error in Rust is more appealing to me than debugging a segfault or race condition in C, especially since Rust will always tell me when one exists. Or more importantly, I can feel comfortable pushing new fast low-level code to production knowing it's not a risk. There's no ambiguity. "fearless concurrency" is not just a buzzword, it's partly what makes Rust fun and practical (for me). As well as the incredibly-fast start-up time of my Rust code compared to Python.

It is also appealing for Python programmers because of the increasingly-decent support for mixing the two languages without overhead, including publishing pure-Rust packages as python modules^1

1. https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3