Right, I'm just saying that the HN zeitgeist is -- at least in this case -- reflecting a real belief. It's what people want to work with, not what currently is

Right, I'm just saying that the HN zeitgeist is -- at least in this case -- reflecting a real belief. It's what people want to work with, not what currently is run everywhere in production; and what developers want to work with definitely matters. Discord rewrote this service in Rust because they had already had success using Rust for some performance critical services; it seems likely that they chose to invest in Rust and not C++ for those services because their developers pushed harder for or were more interested in Rust.