I'm not going to defend the article's writing style, but Rust is effectively a functional language with controlled use of procedural-programming features. Not that much different from how Haskell places safeguards on the very same things. (No, I'm not saying Rust today is just as safe or just as elegant as Haskell - far from it! But it can get there with some work.) Even FP is not what it was back in the 1980s and 1990s!