I know this won't be popular to say on HN, but I think Rust has the same problem Perl does. The language has so many systems to learn and a tough syntax that it looks unreadable to people just starting out.
I mean I could see learning Rust being really hard if you only know something like Python or JS. The only "system", as you say, that is present in Rust that doesn't have something analogous in C++ is the borrow checker, and lifetimes still exist in C and C++. Rust is significantly simpler and easier to learn than C++
C++ has a much shorter time to first non-"hello world" program than Rust. C++ has a lot of features, but few of them are mandatory for general development. With Rust you have a pretty steep hill to climb before your first non-trivial program compiles.
C++ and Rust, IMO have a very similar featureset, Rust just puts that upfront as properly part of the language. Those C++ features are pretty much mandatory for general development, and likewise you will find them in most open source and production projects. Programming without them is just C++'s one of many ways that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself.
Yes, you could program C++ without even knowing what std::unique_ptr (and I talk to many college grads with C++ on their resume who don't know what unique_ptr is, or that C++ has more than one type of pointer). But Rust won't let you use raw pointers (as part of the language), whereas in C++ you will be told "make sure you have read Google's 10,000 word style guide before committing any code".
I believe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23715759 works as a response to your point. In my eyes syntax is the least interesting thing of any language, their semantics are way more important, and quite a bit of syntax ends up being derived from it, and the rest boils down to aesthetics. The syntactic complexity that Rust has is there because it is encoding a lot of information, modulo things like "braces vs whitespace blocks" and "<> vs []" which, again, come down purely to style. Also, having a verbose grammar is useful for tools like the compiler and IDEs because having lots of landmarks in your code aids on error recovery and gleaning intent from not-yet-valid code.
