That's true, but then there's also the case of working on the zig compiler which is roughly a million loc, and with `--watch -fincremental` you can get 200ms recompile even if you change some of the most called function. Meanwhile even a 5k-10k rust project can take a 30s to recompile on minor changes. So the impact on velocity can be quite high, I love both languages, but the Zig compiler is undeniably faster than the Rust compiler and by multiple orders of magnitudes.
Rust also has incremental compiling and is pretty fast, I haven't experienced 30 second compile times when using cargo watch. See also, cranelift, which is supposed to make compile times even faster.