I disagree that you aren't missing "anything", there's no such thing as a free lunch. But I agree that _some_ of the uptick is because people are excited about being a "safe" and "rigorous" developer, but they get a nice package manager with Cargo that feels a lot like pip or npm.

I get a question over and over from front end devs when I teach or mentor about being a "real" computer scientist and picking up c, Cpp, or rust, which is silly. Who do you think invented the dynamically typed languages, English majors?