> Gleam seems to have a lot of obvious influences from Rust, and the creator is a rust dev.

Hi! That's me!

Gleam the language doesn't have any Rust influence really. It's a happy accident that some of the syntax ended up looking the same, but that's likely due to both being inspired by similar languages such as OCaml and the C family. Most the syntax and the semantics predate Gleam's compiler being rewritten in Rust.

The build tool is a rip-off of Cargo for sure though.