F# is even simpler but you have the entire C# and CLR complexity that you need to grok to read it.
Same with Scala, Kotlin and others... I find for people coming from not CLR or JVM or etc Rust has less to worry about.
I do agree all this also means a high intial learning curve but I just find myself liking the language more than others.
Honestly OCaml's ppx and multicore churn scared me away. And for performance focused stuff Rust is the best ML-curious language around, atleast for me and a lot of other people.
I personally like F# a lot too it might be the better language if only Microsoft invested in it more.
Kotlin and Scala on the other than are just imho too tightly coupled with JVM. I have seen AoT attempts for both but man are they not good enough.
Personally I just like the ethos of Rust more for some reason. The idea of safety through type system while ensuring we don't have any significant loss of performance is just awesome to me.
And I like to think a lot of people share that opinion.
I might be wrong, and so can a lot of other people but I just want to see the idea of Rust succeed.
To be clear I write a lot of Go and like Zig and Haskell as well but Rust just feels more practical. I am not sure what it is...
And I have checked I am not any less productive in Rust than in Go. Or anything else including C#