Looking at the most recent stackoverflow developer survey[1], most of the developers expressing interest in Rust would be moving from high level languages like Javascript and Python. It doesn't surprise me that developers with that background wouldn't be aware of systems programming concepts like bitshifts. I've seen similar code in Java (convert to boolean array, move bits down, convert back to integer) that was written in earnest.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-worke...