> I trust Debian to vet and package things in a way that won't break my desktop.

Um, has there been some instance where rustup broke a desktop? And I'm assuming Debian has actually delivered on this worst case scenario?

Debian's done a pretty good job here. If you run unstable you'll get up to Rust 1.85 (whereas the project home will get you 1.88).

Of course, it's Debian; stable is alllll the way back on 1.63, state of the art in 2022.