Cargo has been co-created by Yehuda Katz, who worked on Ruby's Bundler before. Cargo has been designed after npm, so it definitely took lessons from it, but it doesn't make sense to just broadly attribute this to Rust being JavaScript-adjacent.
The Rust syntax is not coming from JavaScript. It even has conflict with it, using `let` and `const` differently, since the `let` in Rust comes from Ocaml, not JS.
Both JS and Rust copy from the same C/C++ roots. Rust's curly brace flavor is more similar to Go and Swift. The original author of Rust liked a lot of languages with different syntaxes, but the C-like syntax has been a pragmatic choice to avoid putting off the target audience of C++ programmers:
Cargo is, however, a similarity with JS. On the whole a good one. Also, cargo works much more like npm than maven, for example.