I’ve been using Rust as my primary language as a professional software engineer for err 5 years? I think if you come from a background of needing to understand the concepts the compiler enforces but in a language that doesn’t check them the learning curve is fine as you already learned those lessons the hard way (Random crashes and days-long debugging sessions) but if you are coming from a higher level language there is definitely a steep learning curve.

I think people love it because after you have had your fight with the compiler, almost always the program only contains logic errors not errors caused by baggage in the language.