I'm not sure it shows that. Even basic features of Rust we take from granted come from concepts common users do not need to understand. Borrowing of lifetime draws from affine types, but nobody cares when writing Rust code. If in 2012 you read a similar article explaining borrow checking in academic terms you would have thought Rust would be unusably hard, which is not.

Also I do not think that adding features is always bad to the point of comparing with Scala. Most of the things the article mentions will be almost invisible to users. For example, the `!Forget` thing it mentions will just end up with users getting new errors for things that before would have caused memory leaks. What a disgrace!

Then, pattern types allow you to remove panics from code, which is super helpful in many critical contexts where Rust is used in production, even in the Linux kernel once they will bump the language version so far.