Rust has a lot going for it beyond just the safety thing: excellent package manager, powerful trait system and generics, helpful compiler errors.

The whole language is designed to help you avoid making the programming mistakes people tend to make, not just the borrow checker and memory safety.

The price difference is quickly made up for with the re-usability factor.

I don’t think that’s true, CD-Rs cost pennies. You have to rewrite every CD-RW 4 or 5 times before it’s comparable in price. In practice, across every CD-RW ever made, the approximate number of times it is written is probably about 0.5