Definitely going against the tide; but possible

e.g. Chrome & Fuchsia both build included Rust bits using their existing build system.

Bazel and Buck2 both work well with it, relatively.

One can also just be really disciplined with Cargo and not add superfluous deps and be careful about the ones you do include to monitor their transitive dependencies.

IMHO this is more about crates.io than Cargo, and is the biggest weakness of the language community. A bulk of developers unfortunately I think come from an NPM-using background and so aren't philosophically ... attuned... to see the problem here.