Indeed, the flood of Rails people who went over to Rust have definitely given some people pause to consider the direction it was taking.

I don't see this particular case of someone who spent a significant amount of time coding core Rails OSS library being seen as a negative though, quite the opposite. If anything it would be an excellent measure of the language for that particular use case assuming any competent developer would seek to operate in the constraints of the language rather than shoehorning an existing implementation into something that doesn't fit.

The bigger question is whether the ORM label itself is limiting or can be understood to fit into a broader scope of implementations.