@dave my take of the current state: in general, rust is an interesting language. As a long-time dev C++ dev you'll run into the borrow checker because of the extra rules it imposes, which you aren't used to, but makes more constraints enforcible early on.
Alternatively, Zig is gaining traction, for not imposing excess restrictions (could be a loss) but instead making everything explicit incl. heap allocations. Larger projects usually benefit from having few surprises.
In case you're curious.