>Knowing what I know now, I wish Rust existed when I started out so that it could have been my first language

No offense but I don't think this makes any sense (or only if you take the first part of that sentence literally). It's like jumping into Calculus 3 to introduce a kid to maths. From a teaching standpoint, if you're a beginner, you can't even understand what problem Rust solves. Someone who doesn't know what manual memory management, a heap and a stack is should not be handed a borrow checker.

You can either start from the top, the old school way, teach a lisp or python as a more modern alternative and teach people symbolic computing, or you can start with C and teach people from the bottom up how computers work, but frankly throwing you into a language that basically exists to solve problems professional C++ developers have in large projects is kind of wild

People were learning C and malloc long before Python came along. You don't need to start with a high level language.

Rust does way more than "solve problems professional C++ developers have". That's not a fair or accurate read of the language. I think you're misinformed.