Actually, I read an interview with one of the Rust devs recently where he said that one of the meanings behind the name "Rust" is that they purposely chose not

Actually, I read an interview with one of the Rust devs recently where he said that one of the meanings behind the name "Rust" is that they purposely chose not to use any ideas from programming language research within the past 10 years. IIRC it was because they wanted to use only ideas that had had some time to mature and be used in practice. So yes, Rust chose to willfully ignore at least some of the past 50 years of PL design research. :)