I think that's your vision of marketing. Marketing by word of mouth because you really like a product is still marketing, and the Rust community is really good at that.

The Rust community realized early that if they wanted to succeed, they had to talk about Rust a lot, show good examples, be beginner friendly to avoid people picking it up and dropping it quikly. But that "marketing" is also things like a really good package manager, really good compiler errors, a really good VSCode extensions. Many communities don't have this (especially the new ones) and this makes developing in Rust more of a joy than in let's say OCaml or even JS.

I don't know if I'd say beginner (an initio) friendly but we have some really clever people on our forums who have a lot of time for new people.

There will be a book on dlang.org soon, that's the one thing I think we're lacking at the moment.

Rust had Mozilla blog posting about it for a long time.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/

Let's not pretend marketing is just paid Facebook/Google ads.