I've been developing mostly in Rust for the last five years. C++ for decades before that.
It is always comforting to dismiss something that you haven't made much effort to understand as unnecessarily overcomplex. I think we're all guilty of that at times.
Ah, i see. But the systems crowd (I'm going to lump them all together: microcontroller, kernel, high performance networking, etc.) is supposed to be the main target audience. For me it is hard to believe that so many of them just brush it off as too complex on first sight.
On the other hand, maybe those folks decided, after giving it a serious try, it's not worth it.
Mind you, that does not mean they are right. But in the end, if the effort for those people is perceived as too high, then maybe, just maybe, in practice it really is.
After more than 25 years as a developer, I learned the hard way, that programming languages, are, in the end, a matter of taste. You won't get someone to use a language, just by citing the feature list. Programming languages are a product made for developers. If they don't like it (for whatever reasons, and yes, these are at times highly subjective) they won't use it.
Sure, but we aren't making decisions in a vaccum with no consequences.
If I really like C and I ship a bunch of C code that gets exploited to build a botnet, that decision had consequences. I should have valued safety higher and the fact I didn't "like" safe alternatives was a distraction.
It is always comforting to dismiss something that you haven't made much effort to understand as unnecessarily overcomplex. I think we're all guilty of that at times.