IIRC, Rust came about because Mozilla did took the iterative improvement approach with it's DOM infrastructure code and after multiple tries that all involved c

IIRC, Rust came about because Mozilla did took the iterative improvement approach with it's DOM infrastructure code and after multiple tries that all involved critical, security impacting bugs being missed, no matter the level of diligence they required from contributors, they wanted to see if they could create a system that enforced that diligence up front. They chose to create a language whose semantics and defaults make it a lot harder to make the kinds of mistakes that kept dining previous attempts at iterative improvement. To that end, Rust has been, in practice, for the Mozilla team, the most effective way to achieve their goals. Whatever else there is to say about Rust, it did solve a real problem Mozilla had, that they had been otherwise unsuccessful at solving after multiple serious attempts over a period of years.