It definitely wasn’t meant as a criticism - I think Rust is uniquely suited to writing web applications as well. I just find it funny that writing web apps is easy enough in Rust that it almost minimizes its opinionatedness, since you don’t really need to worry about difficult lifetimes or ownership when it’s JSON in, JSON out, and the database is just an externality, and you don’t have hard performance requirements despite Rust being made for performance. It seems like an impedance mismatch but it works out.
I think some C/C++ devs take a perverse pride in their language not being suitable to write web servers, because webdev is not real programming anyway (excepting the 'systemsy' parts like nginx).
Well, Rust is great at systems, great at web servers, pretty good at one-off script, even pretty usable for frontend. Every time I hear someone pigeonhole it as just a systems language, I think - you're missing out.