Rust has the twin features of significant technical merits and a powerful hype machine. In truth, it's neither the devil nor the best thing since sliced bread. It has enough traction that the tooling and developer experience are always improving, and appeals to a wide range of uses. Rust was lucky enough to get noticed when it was decent pre 1.0, which motivated the community to make it excellent at 1.0, and it's been making history ever since. I think Rust got critical mass because it had a bold vision and focused on developer experience enough to get buy in on improving its performance and robustness. Ada is wonderful, but it's less pretty, and doesn't make pretensions. In that sense, Rust was built for the hype, but the language has benefitted greatly from all the attention.