> I've often wondered how this can be possible, given that to me it's such an obvious glaring issue that all the other cited problems are distant distant seconds at best.

It's amazing how little I understand your point of view. And I'm being genuine and not critical of you at all.

To me, all of the features of the language, from move semantics, to ergonomic sum types, to nicer error handling (to me. I know it's debatable), and great runtime performance are so important, and bring me so much more peace and joy while working that compile times are literally not even on my radar. I simply don't care if they ever get better (assuming that effort is being put elsewhere. I guess if the language is "done" then work on the compile times is appreciated).

And I've certainly done real work in languages that compile fast (Go, Java) and languages that don't even compile. They always made me so much less happy because of the languages themselves just not clicking with my mental model of problem solving. Again, compile-run feedback loop just had nothing to do with it.

All that said, I use Rust Analyzer for code completion and it's generally fast enough. But it's still sometimes has a noticeable stall. That's not my favorite and it's kinda related to compile times.

Just really amazing how different people using the same tool have such wildly different modes of interaction and perceptions. Cool stuff. Cheers!