It's the most loved language, by a wide margin, and has been for several years.
PS: and to be honest, I love programming in Rust. So I will defend it tooth and nail even if I can't use it in my day-to-day work at the office.
I'll echo your point about loving programming in Rust. I've programmed and continue to program in other languages (Java, PHP, Go), but nothing gives me the same joy as programming in Rust. I know it'll run the first time and likely work correctly as well. And what's more, it'll be faster than any code I could have written in another language.
Not everyone will feel this way, certainly. They, like GP, might come to this bizarre conclusion that noone could like Rust this much, and therefore there is a shadowy cabal promoting Rust for unknown reasons. I don't think there's much we can say to convince them otherwise.
But one thing I do when I see folks complaining that they've never seen such promotion on HN ever. I click on their profile to check how old their account is. Invariably it's 2016 or later. Which means they never saw the cycles of Ruby, JS and Go promotion. This will come and go. In a few years we'll be complaining about, I don't know, the relentless promotion of Mojo.
Provided that was the account they've been using since they started on HN ;)
i.e. JS allow webpages to do stuff without needing to reload the page every time. It basically lets you make mods for the browser! Like JQuery was really useful at the time and not now because everybody browser implemented their methods.
i.e. Ruby (Rails), IIUC it was super easy to do CRUD sites without spending as much time on the tedious plumbing/infrastructure stuff.
Nothing is perfect, but Rust is definitely more pleasant to work with (for me at least) than C++, JS, TS, Python, Go, or anything else I’m likely to get a job using. I do think it’d be fun to work in a Clojure or Elixir shop, but I’m still hobby-level on those, so probably it’s just the perception of green grass.
"...among users that respond to StackOverflow surveys."