I mean if i care about safety that much i would just write the damn thing in ATS. Rust has too many escape hatches to be safe anyway.

You never have only one requirement to satisfy. For example, if you'd welcome a certain amount of contributors, your language should be something people know or people like to learn. And of course it may just be the mood of the initiator, which I find completely fine.

Personally I find rust projects very inviting. Figuring out the amount of unsafe code is easy with grep/rg (to a certain degree), the project structure is pretty standardized, etc. All of this makes even a complex project relatively easy to start with. At the same time, the language is pretty usual (C-like and readable). I understand people like it, and writing "written in rust" is a good call for those people, I guess.

"Written in JS" would communicate something else than "written in D" or "written in C++". It communicates a lot of things implicitly.