> I eventually came to the decision to stop developing in Rust, despite its popularity
It's also not popular for a language that old. It's roughly as popular as Ada was when it was the same age Rust is today (there may not have been as many projects written in Ada then, but there were certainly much bigger/more important projects being written in Ada then). It's not nearly as popular as C, or C++, or Java, or C#, or Go were at that age.
The relatively small number of developers who program in Rust, and the smaller still number of them who use it at work, are certainly very enthusuastic about it, but an enthusiastic "base" and popularity are very different things.
The only lists it's topped are for likeability by users, where it was followed by Elixir and Clojure. If we go by the meaning of popularity that suggests how many people use these languages, let alone professionally, their ratings are quite low (e.g. https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...). Considering how old Rust is, the numbers are significantly lower than of any language that's become truly popular (as in widespread). An old language used by so few people can be many things, but "popular" isn't one of them.
You're citing language demand as a result of incumbent industry usage. That's an inherently weighted metric because existing products are not (contrary to what some Rust zealots might want) going to be rewritten in Rust for no reason.
i.e, it's not rocket science - languages with 10-20+ year history are embedded in the industry. News at 11. ;P
Popularity - as the term is actually used - is one where Rust is fine.
I was comparing Rust to the popularity of other languages at the same age. Its adoption rate is not fine for a language that old if it aims to one day be as popular as C++ is today (or even as popular as Go is today).
The only modern language you listed is Go, which had Google backing it and is a simpler language overall. The rest achieved their popularity when the industry was smaller and there wasn't as much competition.
Those of us who were programming in the nineties and before remember there was a lot of competition [1]; not less than today. It's just that not much of it survived to this day in any popular form. Also, C++ didn't have any stronger backer than Rust, at least not at first. (BTW, Go's introduction was closer in time to Python's or Java's than it is to today; both Go and Rust are already fairly old languages)
[1]: In the application space, there were VB, Delphi, Smalltalk, and a host of other so-called "RAD languages". In the scripting space, Perl was dominant. In the low-level space, we had the entire Pascal family, with Ada and, to a lesser extent, Oberon.
It's also not popular for a language that old. It's roughly as popular as Ada was when it was the same age Rust is today (there may not have been as many projects written in Ada then, but there were certainly much bigger/more important projects being written in Ada then). It's not nearly as popular as C, or C++, or Java, or C#, or Go were at that age.
The relatively small number of developers who program in Rust, and the smaller still number of them who use it at work, are certainly very enthusuastic about it, but an enthusiastic "base" and popularity are very different things.