For me: because the languages that it is supposed to replace ie the C-style curly brace Lang’s in the systems/low-level/backend niches are all pretty bad. And a lot of us have used them for a decade or three so we are very aware of what’s bad.

If you come from Java/C# and discover the speed of C without the pain of C, or if you come from C/C++ and notice life with decent compiler messages, a nice package manager, sane modules etc. - that’s a fantastic feeling.

For me, it's hard to quantify. Writing Rust feels different from any programming I've ever done in the past 12 years. It reminds me of the first time I dove into functional programming. You pay so much of the development cost up front in both time and frustration. But once it works, the guarantees you're left with provide a level of security and confidence that's unmatched in my experience. Somewhat similar to having a high quality unit test suite and strictly following TDD Kent Beck's way. The process is weird, but I love it.

I just started working through a textbook to learn Rust, coming from a heavy Typescript/Node background. It's too soon to say whether or not I'm in love but I already really like the approach to lower level programming with modern development perks like linting (RLS), package management (Cargo), simple build scripts (Cargo again). Comparing it to NPM+Node, there's a lot to like.

I'm really looking forward to learning more.

I made this as a presentation to the people I worked with a couple years ago. I haven't updated it since then but I think it's still relevant today if you want some perspective on why I personally like it: https://aphistic.github.io/why-i-like-rust/

Others have answered about the performance, and it is incredibly efficient. But for me it's the community - /r/rust and discussions on here about Rust have always been pretty friendly and understanding, which hasn't been my experience with other programming language fans (looking at you, C++).

For me, it's because it combines the perfomance of a low-level langauge with convenience of high-level statically typed functionally-oriented language.

Disclaimer: This is personal observation.

Fetishization of low-level languages by primarily Javascript developers, plus it has the same socially liberal online community that Javascript has, due to Mozilla.

I hope this comment doesn't portray any bias.