> 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.