People who are at home in a memory managed language tend to have little interest in a language that is slightly more low-level, but still memory managed. I believe that this is the main contributor to Rust's rise. Even if I suspect that most production Rust code is from people coming from the memory managed side, looking for a safer way to avoid any performance compromise.
The quest to improve Java and .NET low level capabilities, Swift, Nim, Chapel, Linear Haskell and OCaml effects, show otherwise.
Rust's sweet spot is on the OS layer, or bare metal workloads, where similarly to high integtry computing, no heap allocations are allowed, or only in very controlled scenarios.
I didn't say that there's no desire for low level capabilities: without that, nobody from managed environments would care about Rust. But to overcome the skillset inertia that keeps people in the language they are already good at, the gap needs to be bigger than "it's still gc, but the runtime is slightly more lightweight". I'd rather consider those projects as evidence of how high that "different enough" threshold needs to be.
Back in 2003 I loved the idea of D, even if I never used it. But then I also loved the idea of C++/CLR, so I would not put too much on my judgement. My opinion about D has changed far less: still have a soft spot for it, just not enough to make the jump
