I would be slightly more cynical and suggest that the easy tooling enables people prone to cheap chest-thumping to get into the language, when otherwise those types would probably wander somewhere else. The difficulty of the borrow checker will already create investment-induced loyalty[0], but if the first difficulty isn't even unique to the project, then the interesting difficulty doesn't have a chance to work.

Speaking, myself, as someone who likes Rust but wishes people would be more clear-eyed and less obnoxious about it.

[0] Someone remind me what the standard term for this is? You know, the thing where people get really emotionally invested in things where they've invested a lot of time and effort, like Vi or Emacs or Dark Souls?