AFAIK there was never "general GC". There was a GC'd smart pointer (@), and its implementation never got beyond refcounting, it was moved behind a feature gate (and a later-removed Gc library type) in 0.9 and removed in 0.10.

Ur-Rust was closer to an "applications" language for sure, and thus closer to Go's (possibly by virtue of being closer to OCaml), but it was always focused much more strongly on type safety and lifting constraints to types, as well as more interested in low-level concerns: unique pointers (~) and move semantics (if in a different form) were part of Rust 0.1.

That is what the community glommed onto, leading to "the pivot": there were applications language aplenty, but there was a real hunger for a type-heavy and memory-safe low level / systems programming language, and Rust had the bones of it.

I didn't know I wanted this, but yes, I did want this and when I got it I was much more enthusiastic than I'd ever been about languages like Python or Java.

I bounced off Go, it's not bad but it didn't do anything I cared about enough to push through all the usual annoyances of a new language, whereas Rust was extremely compelling by the time I looked into it (only a few years ago) and has only improved since.