I much prefer the new syntax. The C based shader languages always end up in some kind of uncanny valley where it looks like C and C++ but behaves completely differently.

It's not exactly Rust either, the @annotations aren't written like that in Rust for example.

The let-syntax is closer to Javascript with type annotations, so that makes more sense for web programming than doing C style variable definitions. Using let and var instead of let and cons is a bit of a weird choice, though.

Other than the variable definition syntax, this syntax may as well have been C++-based without all the verbose names that C++ likes to add to its namespaces. Shades will usually mostly be math code, though, so it shouldn't even matter all that much in practice.

Not sure how it remotely looks “awful and alienating”. It looks like basically every recent language to me (swift/kotlin/rust/typescript). I feel like you just saw something that has the same numeric type names as Rust and jumped to conclusions.

Not if you're a rust programmer!