I'd argue Rust is one of the most "unfun" languages in terms of syntax but it's offset by the crates ecosystem and cargo toolchain being easily the most pleasant within systems programming

No matter if C or C++ was more "fun", CMake is not and I think the the "fun" parts of coding are worse with Rust but the particularly unpleasant ones are relatively good. In that sense Rust's success might be due to it being more or a "pain pill" than a "vitamin"

Michael Hashimoto has made comments to the effect that Zig is attractive to him relative to Rust simply because it's more enjoyable to write but I think there's very few people for whom that could outweigh the lack of ecosystem