This is the trade off.
Sure the upfront investment in Rust higher, Go is almost too small, but the upfront cost of Rust is amortized via the hours you save with all the abstractions and performance you get right out of the box.
It’s just too confusing of a term these days, and nobody knows what it actually means, so it’s not useful.
Likewise those universities doing OS research in Go, submitting their findings to USENIX.
I agree, but I think many people assume that this is the only benefit achieved. The presence of the borrow checker and rigorous memory safety requirements allows the compiler to take substantially more advantageous paths in allocation/deallocation compared to e.g. C. The benefit attained is similar to the benefit of switching from C to very well memory-managed C++, except it comes by default.
This is a significant advantage even in code that is not concurrent at all. I feel like it's a shortcoming of Rust's marketing, if anything, that the safety restrictions are often pitched only in context of thread-safety rather than memory-usage-optimization.