The issue is much more general. I also don't see a particular problem with Rust here, but I do see with Rust the same false hope I saw in the late eighties and

The issue is much more general. I also don't see a particular problem with Rust here, but I do see with Rust the same false hope I saw in the late eighties and early nineties with C++ (hell, I fell victim to it myself back then): the belief that with enough features, cleverness, and language complexity we could have the cake and eat it too -- have all the control of a low-level language with the same productivity as a high-level language. Low-level languages, whether they try to appear as high-level ones on the page or not, all suffer from low-abstraction, i.e. the inability to hide internal implementation details behind an API and isolate them from consumers. This makes changing implementation details hard and the program much more rigid, and so increases maintenance cost. The problems with C++ weren't apparent at first, because writing the program the first time is as easy as with a high-level language; the problems start when you change the program over the years. There is no doubt Rust cleans up C++ and solves some particular problems with it, but it doesn't solve this fundamental problem. There are many situations where a low-level language and the control it affords are absolutely necessary, but low-level programmers are aware of the non-negligible price they pay.