I would have picked Elixir, but it's unsuitable for game dev (at least thus far)

I wouldn't consider it "Rust evangelism" as much as "not C/C++/any language that makes it trivially easy to write undefined-behavior bugs, evangelism".

I'd be just as much a fan of Roc, but they're not yet mature and actually in the middle of a compiler rewrite (as it so happens, from Rust to Zig, lol) https://www.roc-lang.org/