We've met at Rails conf, in Tel Aviv many years ago. You seemed nice, so I'm motivated to try to give you my 2c.
I believe Rust can be more than safety but right now it isn't as you are imagining it.
I've started off in the demoscene in the early 90's, and so I've had my share of assembly, C, and C++ as a kid. I've built demos, games, generative 3D art with 8-64kb executables, without access to Internet or any form of proper knowledge, and it's funny how scared I am of attempting this again today when I'm much older, and much, much more experienced. I think one of the scary factors are the time-to-value ratio: I'm used to several orders of magnitude more productivity, and have much less time.
I think the most important take away from my background story that you can adopt is - make Rust playful. Fun is a a base element for curiosity, it what drives us where we're the most receptive - when we're kids - to learn, to experience, and to understand what will in be our toolbelt for the next dozen years.
Make rust playful. Make a game framework. Make it build on a mobile device. Make it build on a Pi (without docker, and the entire diarrhea of toolchain you have to use). Make it build for the Arduino. Cross compile it to Javascript (for fun!).
Often I try my hands at C and C++ again. When I do that, I'm not disappointed. I see a comforting place where I've spent my childhood at (and with C++ - some of my professional life). I'm happy with how C++ evolved and how CMake works. I'm not happy because productivity didn't change for the better that much. It still requires around the same amount of time to build things in C and C++ as it did years ago.
Where I do see a change is with Go. It gives me the same comfort, with an insane productivity factor. It also had fun baked in from the start - it can run on mobile, it can run games, and it can compile to what ever I want without a fuss.
I hope my thoughts will make a real change. I really do think this is the missing part with the Rust story.