I think Ada not being very popular shows that the need for a memory safe non-garbage collected language is kind of overstated. If there was really that much of a need, people would have flocked to Ada despite its shortcomings.

Most people solved the safety problem a long time ago by switching to garbage collected languages. As times go on and garbage collector designs get better while hardware gets beefier you can get away with using a garbage collected language in more and more cases. Case in point golang marketing itself as a system programming language and succeeding, not to even mention even the game dev accepting C# these days.

To be clear, there is a niche and need for safe and non-garbadge collected languages and there will always be. I am just saying the niche is much smaller than people might think.

I think it is mistake for Rust evangelists to market safety of the killer-feature of the language. Rust is not popular because of the safety but because it lowered the barriers of entry for a new generation of system programmers by providing excellent tooling, error messages and a type system that take at least the lower hanging fruits of the academic functional world. That is all cool stuff beyond the safety circle jerk.