I don't fall into any of the camps you mentioned specifically. I have been using C++ as my main programming language for a good 15 years and am a big fan of mod

I don't fall into any of the camps you mentioned specifically. I have been using C++ as my main programming language for a good 15 years and am a big fan of modern C++. I tried Rust for a month (every day) and I just feel like it gets in my way too much and it's just not worth the extra friction. A friend of mine (using Python as a physicist) wanted to try system programming recently and I told them to just try Rust and not trouble themselves with C++. I think Rust is the easier language to learn and probably just as powerful, but C++ just gets in your way less. It's not as hard to use correctly as people pretend it is (though I admit that years of experience and studying are required) and if you can use it relatively well you can write safe code without much trouble and you can also have a very high (higher than Rust) level of control seamlessly at the same time. I don't know many people with similar preferences, but most of them do game development, if that helps to contextualize a bit. There safety is not as important and development speed is much more important than for other applications.