The people that System76 sells to most likely buy their hardware. In which case the word 'Rust' is worrying at least. Would you buy a laptop that ships with rust?

Jokes aside: during early development it makes perfect sense to advertise tech being used, because the audience is so different at that time. So even if system76 would "shill" it as a Rust DE, at this phase, that would be fine, because of the highly technical audience.