We don’t know what will happen in the future. But just above the quote that you brought he explains that Rust is actually bringing new developers.

Hohndel commented that the aging of the kernel community is a “double-edged sword.” Torvalds agreed, but he noted that “one of the things I liked about the Rust side of the kernel, was that there was one maintainer who was clearly much younger than most of the maintainers. We can clearly see that certain areas in the kernel bring in more young people.” For example, on the driver side, you’ll have a much easier time finding younger people, and that is traditionally how we’ve grown a lot of maintainers, including Greg [Korah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer].

Hohndel and Torvalds also talked about the use of the Rust language in the Linux kernel. Torvalds said, “It’s been growing, but we don’t have any part of the kernel that really depends on Rust yet. To me, Rust was one of those things that made technical sense, but to me personally, even more important was that we need to not stagnate as a kernel and as developers.”

It will take a lot of time for Rust to play a key role. And it won’t happen without enough Rust developers joining the project in the upcoming years. That itself could motivate more people to learn it, producing self-reinforcing feedback.