> Why try to compete with Rust while not really being a better Rust?

The article addresses this directly and is clear that Carbon is not designed to 'compete with Rust', and instead targets a much narrower use-case:

> Carbon is for those developers who already have large codebases in C++, which are difficult to convert into Rust.

I don't have a large C++ codebase to maintain so I don't currently have any use for Carbon, but I could see it being interesting for those who do.