I'll go ahead and answer "performance". People are switching to these faster tools because speeding up the edit-compile-run cycle speeds up their work.

Yes, it's theoretically possible to write fast tools in JS, but somehow after all these years and millions/billions of dollars invested in the V8 JIT, they are all still slow enough that people will switch to newer tools, with fewer features, purely for the performance win. And these new tools end up faster with little developer time spent on profiling/optimization, because performant code is in the pit of success.

I also wouldn't think of Rust as a low-level language. It has plenty of high-level features like macros, typeclasses, iterators that are nicer than in JS, etc. Speaking as a developer, these make Rust much nicer/faster to use than other languages that lack these things.