My 2¢, it’s perfectly reasonable to bring up other languages in defense of criticism, because it explains why these decisions were made in the first place. GP literally said that rust isn’t a good fit for you if you’re in a position to use a GC. The comparison to C++ is important because it’s one of very, very few contemporary languages that also doesn’t require a GC/refcounting everywhere. So it’s useful to compare to how C++ does it.

Yet another issue with people who criticize rust: they don’t want anyone to defend rust, and complain loudly about anyone defending rust as being a literal problem with the language. You can do better than that.