I had similar with just (a make replacement) and debian 12. It seems requiring the latest of everything is the latest trend of rust ecosystem.

For the compiler in particular, it's pretty common practice to depend on a recent version. The backward compatibility situation is generally excellent, so the only real challenge is getting the compiler installed. That's generally straightforward with rustup, and Debian/Ubuntu also package several versions (under different package names) that are more recent than the distro's default.

That has always been the trend in the rust ecosystem. It's not a new thing.