> Given Rust's numerous benefits, is having subpar compilation time really that big of a deal?

As someone who uses Rust as a daily driver at work at zed.dev (about 600K LoC of Rust), and Zig outside of work on roc-lang.org (which was about 300K LoC of Rust before we decided to rewrite it in Zig, in significant part because of Rust's compilation speed), yes - it is an absolutely huge deal.

I like a lot of things about Rust, but its build times are my biggest pain point.