The idea that Rust is a premature optimization is a weird meme. I don't think the sentence you're referring to is really about Rust per se, but rather the auth

The idea that Rust is a premature optimization is a weird meme. I don't think the sentence you're referring to is really about Rust per se, but rather the author's feelings about manual memory management. Rust just happened to be the language being discussed at the time: "To use Rust for writing programs that can afford the overhead of garbage collection would be premature optimization." The idea being that manual memory management is such a productivity black hole that the lack of GC in a language dominates any 'Flubby' features the language provides.