I read most of your comment as phrasing the things that make rust unique as being additional burdens relative to what you would prefer, which is fair, but often they are what I appreciate about the language. Explicit result types are a great example.

Rigidity is a trade off: it can make initial development slower but refactors significantly easier, just as an example.

I don’t think any of your examples show it to be niche. It operates well in most of the space where C++ is a good option, and a bit beyond that (embedded, firmware, but also higher level things where you want performance but don’t want to worry about memory safety).