I think it's even simpler than that: Rust was a Mozilla project from inception, and suddenly in 2020 it wasn't because Mozilla made all their Rust engineers red

I think it's even simpler than that: Rust was a Mozilla project from inception, and suddenly in 2020 it wasn't because Mozilla made all their Rust engineers redundant. The Rust Foundation lost its main sponsor, because Mozilla pulled out... that's a spectacular betrayal. Amazon comes in with a better offer to support the language. Why say no? Klabnik doesn't like it, but the simple and sad truth is that Mozilla abandoned Rust. edit: this post was pure speculation and I was corrected by Steve Klabnik in a reply :)