By "people threw a fit" you mean the Rust community put up a relentless harrasment campaign targeting the project author, even to the point where they involved their employer, and ultimately forced the maintainer to give up on FLOSS and abandoned the project altogether.
I mean I saw it on Reddit, guy got panned for abusing unsafe and bunch of unsafe were patched out. That's it as far as what I am aware of.
> Rust community put up a relentless harrasment campaign targeting
Don't judge community (especially one you don't know) by their worst member.
Rust community didn't all agree and made a pact to harass/dox that guy. Few assholes did.
Trying to generalize this behavior to entirety of Rust community is disingenuous. Imagine if I started saying all programmers were wife killers, because some programmers killed their wifes.
The community was massively represented in that harassment campaign targeting Actix. We can still read the threads and the bug reports that fueled that shit show. Things got so bad that distinguished members of Rust's core team felt compelled to put on their PR hat to work on salvaging Rust's reputation and do limitation.
It was not bad apples. It was a hallmark of Rust's community.
Also, sure Rust people care overwhelmingly about Rust crates.
Any large enough community will statistically have some percent of "bad apples". You're arguing as if those bad apples are a majority. And not a statistical footnote.
You mentioned Reddit. Rust's subreddit had at the time over 80k subscribers. The subreddit massively piled on the maintainer of Actix. This harassment campaign was so massive that core Rust members felt obligated to write public declarations how Rust should invest in community building and, with the Actix case as an example, whether they could actually reject contempt culture.
It was not an isolated bad apple. Rust's community is renowned for being toxic, hostile and abbrasive. This topic is underlined time and again even in HN. It's not possible to hide this fact.
First. Rust community != Rust Reddit community.
Second. You haven't made an argument, why should we judge 30k or 80k people on basis of how many harrassers?
Third. What other incidents were comparable?
Fourth. Rust community can be toxic but so can HN. HN has a huge Rust hate boner. Any Rust thread on HN will have people repeating tired Rust tropes.