I've seen a pretty clear difference in success with less popular technologies based more on management philosophy and culture than the technologies themselves. Management seeing individual developers as fungible—"lack of fungibility in the engineering team can be a real liability"—is a massive red flag in this regard. I am not surprised to hear Rust didn't work out in an environment like that!
... but especially for a small team, having people able to cross-operate on adjacent pieces of the tech is vital. You can't just not develop if all your Rustaceans catch COVID at the same time.
So "there's a huge bifurcation between people who know this language and people who don't" is a good reason to pick another language. As with so many such techs, network effect can dominate other benefits.
> Management seeing individual developers as fungible—"lack of fungibility in the engineering team can be a real liability"—is a massive red flag in this regard
Yeah, the infamous tin soldier approach that's often used to excuse using worse but more entrenched languages.
