Oh, nice! No, Ada doesn't seem ever to have achieved the same mainstream adoption, or at least awareness, that Rust has. Which is startling to me, because it's comparable to Rust in performance while being far far greater in safety, including inbuilt support for design-by-contract (honestly I feel like I'm shouting at a brick wall trying to get people to understand the benefits of DbC; Rust's type system is only a first-order approximation).
I agree that the problem seems to be that most 'practical programmers' don't understand the benefits of PL-research-y features, until they're forced to use it and then suddenly it takes off (cf the growth of ADTs or dependent typing after TypeScript introduced people to them).
The other problem is the perennial 'trendyism' in programming, which I hate. People won't investigate interesting languages from the 80s with unusual features; only once something's added to the JS framework du jour does it achieve wide adoption.
There was a thread a while back which covered the various variants of Ada and how their memory management contrasts with that of Rust: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210258
Basically: no, it likely hasn't changed much since you learned it, unless that was genuinely decades ago. But there are various solutions (or, at least, ideas which are considered solutions, depending on what you consider the problem to be) that you might have missed!
I agree that the problem seems to be that most 'practical programmers' don't understand the benefits of PL-research-y features, until they're forced to use it and then suddenly it takes off (cf the growth of ADTs or dependent typing after TypeScript introduced people to them).
The other problem is the perennial 'trendyism' in programming, which I hate. People won't investigate interesting languages from the 80s with unusual features; only once something's added to the JS framework du jour does it achieve wide adoption.