I'm just a little further down the road than you are and the best course seems to be to learn a little C++ first because it will help inform why Rust works as it does. Then when you try Rust, if you hate it, you've still got C++.
Rust will beat you over the head with a way of thinking that carries nicely back to C++, and the tooling (Cargo, etc) is more comparable to what someone coming from another language ecosystem would know. Smaller things like Rust's decent support for functional programming seems to click with everyone I know who's dabbling from the JS world.
For those reasons I'm very excited about Austral. The borrows, linear types, and the notion that anything that isn't explicit is wrong, all appeal to me.