> Minecraft was written in Java, so that can't be it.

What does that have to do with the parent comment? The usual argument I've seen is that game developers "move too fast", "don't have everything designed ahead of time", "have to iterate quickly" and Rust's insistence on writing correct code gets in the way of that during the prototype phase.

Java doesn't really have that issue as it is quite a bit more forgiving than C++ and will happily let you hammer a square peg into a round hole at the expense of performance, as evidenced by Minecraft.