As someone who writes, reviews, and maintains lots of C code professionally, here’s what I think a lot of Rust advocates don’t understand: We see and understand the benefits of Rust. That’s no longer something we need to be sold on. Every C programmer who’s written and reviewed any amount of nontrivial C code likely has firsthand experience dealing with memory safety bugs that would simply disappear with a memory-safe language.

The ultimate problem is that most of the muscle memory you’ve built using C over the years becomes useless when writing Rust due to so many of the semantic differences. If you were an expert and highly productive C programmer, your productivity will go out the window for what feels like a long time until you feel even just comfortable writing Rust. That makes Rust a very hard sell for C programmers who simply want to get things done. This is an area, by the way, that I think Zig does extremely well at—it provides safer semantics (despite its lack of guaranteed memory safety à la Rust) in a rather simple language and without rendering so much of your experience useless.