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More than the syntax, it's the verbosity. The more you have to read the more you have to process. Did anyone in the creators of Rust have a look at the syntax of Crystal, Kotlin, Julia, or Elixir ? They're simple, you really don't have to put a lot of effort into reading. Rust looks like C took the verbosity of Java as a mandatory requirement and borrowed some cool concepts of Haskell (but not the simplicity of its syntax though).

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Interesting, I find rust is pretty dense, but mostly in a good way. It packs a lot of important information into the code, which is useful for reasoning about it. Languages with simpler syntax tend to hide that information (and sometimes because it's irrelevant due to the kind of tradeoffs they make, like all the languages you mention have some form of GC). Haskell I would say is especially hard for me to read, when there's so little syntax the code is just a sequence of functions and symbols without obvious delimiters it becomes a lot harder for me to understand the structure of it.

Part of it is the explicitness mandated by the language (i.e. when dealing with Optionals or Results, you have to deal with both cases or explicitly state which you expect as an invariant). There's also curious (imo) choices on the part of rustfmt that seems to favor density of code that way.

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