The reason it feels very different is... because it is very different. Then why does it feel off? Because, while it is very different, it doesn't look very different. Then why doesn't it look very different, when it is very different?
That's because, Rust developers spent conscious effort to make Rust look similar. So feeling something is off with Rust is the result of intentional design of Rust developers. In a sense this is dishonest and deceiving, but Rust without similarity engineering would be considerably less popular and hence less successful.
Rust's ambition was to change the world, not simply to discover a way to change the world and leaving actual changing to others. (Although changing the world requires discovery first.) So Rust chose to "lie".
As an example, Rust's assignment(=) looks similar, but works very different. In fact, since it is very different, it was originally written <-. It was changed to = specifically to make it look similar.