At the risk of dating myself, I suspect the author of that self-described rant either has forgotten how long it took for C++ to mostly dethrone plain C, and perhaps practically more relevantly, how painfully long it took for new versions of C++ to be widespread enough that people dared to rely on them. This stuff isn't easy at scale; adoption is slow.

Doesn't mean rust will ever grow like that, but merely slow adoption doesn't sound like a death knell by itself to me.

100% this. It's still absurd to me how codebases in some industries are still basically C++98 and haven't even begun to transition to at least C++17 (which forces new code that adds or changes features to be written C++98-style as well).

Hard to imagine those companies switching to a different language anytime soon. Maybe the new US government push towards "memory safe" languages will help with that.