Which is to say that Rust has safety features beyond just what we are used to from garbage collected languages. Sum types, stricter typing, data race protections, etc.
I'm not familiar with the marketing that Mozilla did, but whatever they did it does seem to have been effective. However, I do think that the Ada mandate by the DoD would be equivalent or more effective in kick-starting an ecosystem.
The marketing Mozilla employees have came up with is creating a Categorical Imperative for using Rust. The person in the comments section of a C project or any CVE bug will be saying, this would never have happened if this was written in Rust, why aren't you writing this in Rust? The moral thing to do was to write it in Rust! And a lot of software engineers are eager to think and talk like this, because it gives them something more exciting in their lives beyond writing bean counters for selling widgets. Pure functional languages already had a bit of that attitude, but I don't think it caught on nearly so much because actually writing pure functional code is very difficult even for most engineers.
Ada, actually (well, that might not be the last time, but it is certainly much more recent than COBOL.) COBOL and JOVIAL were roughly concurrent – both efforts started in 1959, I believe – but the effort that culminated in Ada started in the mid-1970s.
If COBOL was worse for its time than Ada was for its time (which I don’t think is clear, though I’d rather work with Ada than COBOL if I had to pick one today), maybe that would support an argument about customer-need driven projects vs. vendor-imagination-driven projects.
I have found rust difficult to learn, and I continue to develop and maintain embedded systems with C. I say this not to distance myself from rust, but to indicate my neutrality on the subject.