Personally I tend to use C and C++ tools more often, and in that universe, being statically free of memory errors is an innovation. In the webdev world, I suppose native speed and not having a large runtime or GC is Rust's primary innovation (though for batch jobs like build tools, a small Go-like runtime/GC isn't actually a negative compared to Rust, and I've never noticed GC pauses when I previously use the Micro editor in Golang).