Came here to write pretty much exactly what you said.

I'm using ESP32-S3 chips in a project. Rust support is really nascent and I can't afford to burn too much time on fixing tooling & recreating libraries. Though it does sound kinda fun.

But I imagine there's a chicken/egg challenge where it's hard to see Rust on embedded platforms get more mature unless it gets more adoption and it's hard to imagine a significant uptick in adoption unless it gets more mature.

Modern C++ is getting a little better all the time. And perhaps someday Carbon could be a smoother path to modernity because of its focus on migrating existing c++ codebases.