I think the problem with this logic is that it views language performance on an absolute scale, whereas people actually care about it on a relative scale compared to how fast it could be.
If you tell your boss "We spent $1m on servers this month and that's as cheap as its possible to be" he'll be like "ok fine". If you say "We spent $1m on servers this month but if we just disable this compiler security flag it could be $500k." ... you can guess what will happen.
(Counterpoint though: people use Python.)
But counter-counterpoint: Rust does so much more than preventing runtime memory errors. Even if Fil-C had no overhead (or I was using CHERI) I would still use Rust.
> Rust does so much more than preventing runtime memory errors.
It sure does. Like making your build times slower (and bigger) than if you were using the equivalent tooling for Pascal, C, or Zig.