There is definitely a hype among programmers who are familiar only with higher level languages, but I think the actual core audience is the (ex-)C/C++ community

There is definitely a hype among programmers who are familiar only with higher level languages, but I think the actual core audience is the (ex-)C/C++ community. I am definitely not some integral part of the Rust community, so my experience there is limited, but based on discussions in for example their subreddit, it is definitely not made up of beginners who are just learning what a pointer is. There are beginners, but I see mostly veteran embedded/systems programmers with very good understanding of both low-level systems and the advantages/disadvantages of C++ for example, making up for very technical and interesting comments.