Just to elaborate on the "just more comfortable once you already know it" part, I think a lot of Rust is optimized (willingly or not) for the "once you know it" use case.

Which, while it might arguably hurt adoption, is a good value proposition, since you spend a lot more time knowing the language than not knowing it.

Now, not everything is always perfect, and I agree that the `if let` is not the most useful part of the language, as it drives pointless discussions about when to use it vs match (some people prefer the esthetics of match even when an if let can be used, others prefer to use a if let whenever possible). This redundancy apart, the construct doesn't eat any mental energy once you know it. The same can't be said of many of C++ quirks (initialization rules, member-initializer list in constructors, the rule of five)