> I'm not following: Rust excels at C interop
Zig is an example of excelling at C interop--not Rust.
And Cargo is an impediment in the embedded ecosystem rather than a bonus.
Part of why we're getting Rewrite-it-in-Rust everywhere is precisely because the C interop is sufficiently weak that you can't do things easily in a piecemeal fashion.
And lets not talk about Rust compile times and looking at Rust code in a debugger and just how bad Rust code is in debug mode ...
I don't have strong opinions in either direction about Zig. But there's clear empirical evidence that Rust has a successful C interop story[1][2][3].
And note: browsers are the pathological case, in terms of build system integrations, global state assumptions, C++, etc.
(Your other complaints have a place, and don't seem unreasonable to me. But they're empirically not impediments to Rust's interop story.)
[1]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
[2]: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/build/buildsystem/ru...
[3]: https://www.memorysafety.org/blog/rustls-nginx-compatibility...