Rust has a huge exposure in the programming community. I may not know how to write it, but I sure know what it is. It's not just limited to HN in awareness.
That same team I'd sit down and chat with the CS PhD majors that were doing machine learning. It genuinely surprised me when a brilliant student said he'd never heard of Rust.
TIOBE is a garbage metric, but Rust's numbers are paltry there. It's key to some really important projects, but it still isn't a widely-used language.
IMO it’s better (explicit) to see a call to `.clone()`, but maybe this is because I’m not up to my elbows in C++ everyday. Either way, I think Rust will continue to grow in popularity (C as well).
And it's used exactly nowhere. Can you name one project that is rust based and isn't part of the rust toolchain?
Parts of Firefox are implemented in Rust.
Swc is a JS bundler written in Rust.
I agree it's not a super in-demand skill as far as job postings go, but it's not exactly completely unused either.
Some others : https://lib.rs/command-line-utilities