Deterministic memory management and bare metal performance are great and have been realized benefits. The great promises were realized.
On the “do your job” front though, the lack of a good STABLE library ecosystem has been a real issue and big source of frustration. It seems that most library developers in the Rust community are hackers writing Rust for fun, and I do not say that in a negative way. But the consequence is that things are usually not super well maintained, but more critically are targeting Rust Nightly (which makes sense as Nightly has all the new cool compiler stuff).
Add the scarce professional talent pool, the unavoidable steep learning curve, low bus factor risk... It’s just hard to justify pushing (professionally) more Rust beyond its niche.
With Mozilla pulling out (to some extent), the big focus on Web-assembly... it just feels off if all you want to do is build boring backends.
The contrast with Golang’s “boring as a feature” is quite interesting in that regard.
Time will tell if Rust will make it to the major leagues, or will be another Haskell.