Before Rust, C was my preferred language. It's really hard to talk about Rust in a way that doesn't sound like talking trash about C, because Rust's main reason to exist is preventing safety issues that… people programming in C usually say are not C's fault, so there's nothing to fix there.

The other aspect is that Rust has been developed recently, and didn't have to deal with all the legacy constraints of C. The features that Rust has would be mostly boring compared to modern GC or scripting languages, but they're notable for being in a language that can be as low-level as C. Comparing them directly to C does like trashing C — namespaced modules instead of textual inclusion, macro preprocessor based on AST (do-while tricks not needed), no headers, no need for build scripts in most programs, package management that works on Windows and macOS too, etc. Many other languages have this stuff, but C doesn't, so they're an interesting upgrade from C just because C is so old.