It adds an excellent packaging system and developer experience in the form of cargo, which is also a package manager for external modules. "The bar", I think, is taken to mean the combination of all of these features and their execution, not the idea of modules.

A packaging system is orthogonal to modules.

Those ideas are also present in Maven, Gradle, NuGet. All older than cargo.

And all trace back to CPAN as general concept.

I am still waiting for cargo to support binary libraries.

Rust has not brought much new in terms of modules. It just has decent modules support according to established best-practice. The innovations are primarily around the borrow-checker.

That I agree with.