Reframing your question, it's incredibly impressive how popular Rust has become without a halo product, halo company, etc. Rust proponents will readily argue that Go is only as popular as it is because of being championed by Google. Meanwhile Rust has had to grow to the place where it is organically.

My personal belief is that over time Rust will inevitably eclipse C and C++. But it will take time. C and C++ will never fully go away, but projects that would have been written in them will be over time be preferentially written in Rust. The Linux kernel starting to write drivers in it is a harbinger of this, and once that effort has made it into released kernels we'll quickly start to see other parts of the kernel adopt Rust.

> AFAICT the future’s not looking bright for rust right now. It’s coasting on a wave of enthusiasm from relatively junior developers who aren’t making impressive things with the language yet.

Frankly this is my perspective of Go, which is (from my vantage point) mostly popular amongst junior developers. Rust is not even remotely marketed towards novices, and in many of the communities it's openly acknowledged that it's perhaps not the best choice for someone just setting out. C and C++ programmers are the ones primarily flocking toward Rust, while Python, Ruby, and Node developers are the ones who are primarily adopting Go as they're starting to see the value of static types, even as anemic as Go's type system is.

Anecdotally I know many, many engineers who have grown disillusioned with Go once they've worked on larger projects and had to repeatedly reinvent wheels that other languages provide as built-in features. Many of those engineers have gone on to champion Rust, and the flow of engineers between those two languages from my point of view heavily favors Rust.

But without a big champion like Microsoft, Google, or Sun/Oracle, this growth is going to happen organically and take time. Maybe there will be an enormous driver like Kubernetes for Go, Rails for Ruby, or ML for Python, but even without that I think Rust will gradually continue to snowball.