I understand Rust's goal is to have the zero-cost abstractions of C and C++ with greater safety, effectively displacing them.
This is obviously a personal opinion, but sometimes I like being able to create bugs in my code. Not from an industrial or business standpoint, but from a greater understanding POV. It's easier to reason about the underlying machine (yes, yes I know C/C++ models abstract machines) when I can actually break that machine with the tools at hand. There's unsafe Rust which I have not looked at, but in terms of getting my hands dirty, sometimes C/C++ just feels better. The primitiveness, even of template programming vs Haskell's typeclasses, or constexpr vs D's CTFE. Something about that raw primitiveness is attractive. This is absolutely positively probably just experience bias. I'm not sure if anyone else can relate to this.
So in that regard, I see Rust as orthogonal. If you want that feeling like, "hey, I'm just directly fiddling raw virtual memory addresses", that's not Rust's target. Rust markets itself as a safe language that hides all those bits by default.
