Rust is pretty good for command line tooling, news at 11.
Tbh I would much rather write utilities in Go. The advantages of Rust are minimal here and the disadvantages are an obstacle. Last time I wrote a CLI in Rust it was a search index builder you could pipe CSV to. Awful DX. Go is almost too easy for that kind of thing.
Yeah, you don't need/want manual memory management for most CLIs.
If anything I’ve actually seen people using the OS’s virtual memory as a garbage collector in C and C++. Not really portable everywhere, but close enough for most people. For short-lived executables that can’t really allocate unlimited memory, it’s perfectly fine.
I've done that. But in those cases, GC would also be fine. Might even end before it collects.