Oh man, I just did a thesis on using a memory safe language like Rust for the kernel.

The consensus in research was that Rust is extremely promising for designing a next gen memory safe OS. Some data structures are troubling to implement (paging table, etc.) but the benefits are significant.

This is just a DE but if it's a sign of more things to come potentially over the next decade I am very excited.

Linux is always going to be fragmented, and other OS (ex. Android) are either already integrating some Rust or are strongly considering it (ex. Microsoft).