This has very little to do with Rust.

The entire software development industry has slept on error handling without exceptions and Rust developers are the first ones to actually start addressing the problems.

This problem should have been solved decades ago by C/C++ developers.

They are not first by any means, but the popular languages definitely focus on the happy path with varying but consistently insufficient degrees of enforcement of handling deviations… because that’s easy to iterate on.

Java e.g. would benefit from a strict null mode, but the legions of half baked ‘engineers’ wouldn’t comprehend how to write software when you can’t initialize a reference to null and only set it later.