One reason would be reliability. Almost all of the errors on the application I work on are nil references or errors that were expected, but just weren't handled

One reason would be reliability. Almost all of the errors on the application I work on are nil references or errors that were expected, but just weren't handled. Rust forces you to handle those at compile time, ending with a better all around software. There are other languages that achieve the same, I'm just comparing Rust to the usual suspects for web-dev (JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, etc).