alt Hacker NewsBy any standard of language development rust "won" in that a decade after creation it has a thriving ecosystem and companies using it exclusively. The White House named it by name.
I would say it won like it won the lottery, not like it won the tournament.
I'm not sure how a programming language can win other than having a thriving ecosystem and seeing use, as you point out. The current USA government removed the “Back to the Building Blocks: A Path Toward Secure and Measurable Software.” report and fired the people responsible though. So for all we know the current White House might be betting on PHP.
As professional developers, however, I think there is also the job market to consider. It obviously depends on where you live in the world, but in my area there have been 0 Rust jobs for 5 years. There are plenty of C++ jobs, there are even a few Zig jobs once in a while. Go on the other hand has seen an explosive growth, though probably as a replacement for C# and Java rather than for C++.