I get the same impression, and not just from Rust. It's pretty common for most new (or newly-popular old) languages. There will always be a certain percentage of programmers who are less out to solve problems than to look or feel better than other programmers around them. What better way to do that than in a language nobody else at your company knows? Nobody to correct your style, or your use of a deprecated idiom. More glory for writing a library that didn't exist yet in that language than for improving one that already did. You get to write the early blog posts and tutorials, maybe even a book, secure yourself a permanent place at the conferences, etc. The Javascript community (like the Ruby community before it) is full of people who came from Java for those kinds of reasons. There's a similar migration path from C/C++ to Go and now Rust. A long time ago, you might have found emigres from Pascal/Modula/Ada to C.
There are many reasons to move from an older language to a newer one. There are good reasons, and there are bad reasons. I think language designers and evangelists generally do a good job of focusing on the good reasons. It's unfortunate when such advocacy tips over into FUD, but I suppose it's inevitable too. Nobody likes to see their investment devalued because their favorite vehicle to fame and glory lost out, even if the alternative really was even better.