As much as I'm a Python fan I strongly disagree here that rust is a red herring.
Having a static binary makes distribution way simplier. There are a bunch of ways you could try to achive something like in python but it would be significantly larger.
Performance-wise writing it in python would have heavy startup overhead and wouldn't be able to get close to the same level of performance.
Obviously you could achive the same thing in many other languages, but rust ends up being a really good fit for making a small static binary for this workload of network heavy, IO-bound, async/threading friendly with the occasional bit of CPU heavy work.
> The politics looked intractable so I gave up.
So yeah, this is your actual problem. (Don’t worry, I’m in the same camp here.)