For a long time, Rust == performance because a _lot_ of people moved into Rust that had never really done programming with a concurrency-sane compiled programming language. For them, Rust was synonymous with performance!

Many supporting crates reinforced this. Rayon, Tokio (though not "performant", it was an improvement over naive impl), etc made jumping from hello world to parallel/concurrent execution pretty simple.

But I'm glad to see the downturn on that hype cycle.