> Meanwhile, the ship is sinking.

No it is not. We have a lot of amazing and rock solid software written in C and C++. Stuff mostly works great.

Sure, things could be better but there is no reason why we need to act right now. This is a long term decisions that doesn't need to be rushed.

> What is left is pretty much only Zig and Rust.

We had Ada long before Rust and it is a pretty amazing language. Turns out security isn't that important for many people and C++ is good enough for many projects apparently.

There is also D, Nim, Odin and so on.

> Garbage collection is a huge dealbreaker

It isn't. We had Lisp Machines in the 80s and automatic garbage collection has vastly improved these days. So I wouldn't rule those out either.

In short, no the ship is not sinking. There are many options to improve things. The problems is once you depend on rust it will be hard to remove so it is better to think things through because rushing to adopt it.