What's the overall steelman here? Something like, "Rust isn't a silver bullet. Let's make a subset of a superset of C++ that's safe." Okay, cool. Sounds great and the attempt at making C++ without breaking existing users certainly seems like an uncontroversially good thing to try. I don't really have any response to that.
I don't need a "lense of negativity" to criticize the details of Sutter's argument. This part of the article in particular would be a lot weaker overall if Sutter presented the reality than some sloppy non-sequitur. And that actually matters for his argument because it cuts to the heart of just how big of a trade-off Rust really is. If it isn't as big as he seems to be suggesting, then Rust's value proposition gets stronger. It's a critical flaw in his reasoning.
Steelmanning is great and we should try to do that. But I don't actually see a stronger version of Sutter's argument here. It's not just a phrasing issue, although the phrasing is certainly what jumped out to me. And I could just as easily say that the problem with Sutter's article is that he isn't doing a very good job of steelmanning the case for Rust. Whoop de do.
