It's a valuable skill for sure, but there apparently isn't enough people with this skill on the market, which is why $safe-language-trend-of-the-day is being developed and gains momentum.
Judging by the number of memory vulnerabilities found each year in mainstream operating systems (which are developed by some of the best programmers around), there aren't any people on the market with this skill. This is very likely because all programmers are human beings.
Manually managing memory isn't difficult, it has been proven to be practically impossible. I wouldn't care if it were Linus claiming otherwise, it's ignoring incredible amounts of evidence to the contrary and is much like flat-earther.
How many people must use it? 1k? 10k? 100k?
It’s pointless to argue with someone who throws Rust into that category at this point because it means nothing. It’s a slight to allow them to feel ok, that eventually this language too will pass, and so it will be ignored.