You specifically seemed to be saying "Why use rust when you don't want top tier performance", to which my response was "I do want top tier performance."
That aside, with regards other languages I'd consider candidates for high performance tooling, I'm either not proficient with them, or I don't enjoy working with them.
Undoubtedly, language tooling being fast improves your ability to iterate. 1 second vs 60 seconds doesn’t “seem” like much, but when you have that speed, it becomes very difficult to give it up, and when you know it can be faster, it is incredibly frustrating when it’s slow.
Although I suspect that as your domain knowledge of the software improves, the effect flattens out.