The thing is. There always was a strong theoretical case that Rust should improve software quality (not just because of the fact that you have a lifetime system). The only reasonable counterpoint was that this is theory, and large scale experience is missing. Maybe in high quality code bases the mental overhead of using Rust would outweigh the theoretical guarantees, and the type of mistakes prevented are already caught by C/C++ tooling anyways?

The (in recent years) rapid adoption of Rust in industry clearly shows that this is not the case.