I haven't used it myself, but my understanding as an outsider is that a lot of the excitement around Rust is that it's bringing a new model of memory safety: with the borrow-checker, you can avoid the performance penalties of garbage collection, while also avoiding the bugs and security risks seen in C.

People who care about such things are really hyped because it's a truly new idea in a mainstream(ish) language.

https://willcrichton.net/notes/rust-memory-safety/