I definitely wouldn't say internet, I think it's popular on HN and a few other online forums. There are a lot of X/twitter circles which make are critical of rust, as well as other sites.

In my mind at least there's a decent risk Rust is going to end up like the next Haskell, its benefits other than safety are not that clear and many of those features can and have been replicated in other languages.

Many of its biggest benefits of rust come directly from other languages - including Haskell. Like, rust’s Option is identical to Haskell’s Maybe type. Traits are similar to type classes in Haskell, or interfaces in Go.

In my mind, the thing that makes rust and zig nice are that they put modern language features in a systems language. Non-nullable pointers and match expressions in a language that runs as fast as C? Yes please.

I love rust, but I personally doubt rust will ever be anywhere near as popular as Python, go, JavaScript and C#. It’s just so complex and difficult to learn. But its niche is pretty clear to me: I see it as a tool for writing beautiful, correct, memory safe, performant systems code. I used to love C. But between zig, rust and Odin, I can’t see myself ever using it again. C is just so much less productive and less pleasant to use than more modern languages.