It's also the case that it's a language people want to learn. For better or worse, you'll get candidates who want to use it. C is probably still better for perf

It's also the case that it's a language people want to learn. For better or worse, you'll get candidates who want to use it. C is probably still better for performance due to compiler maturity, but the proportion of devs who say "I want to code more C" to "I want to code more or start coding in Rust" is likely not great. A year or two from now the investment will probably look pretty good.