That's true, the vast majority of applications do not need Rust-level performance.

While I, too, favor Go, my favorite Rust alternative is Smalltalk. In fact, I've written elsewhere that Rust and Smalltalk are perfectly complementary programming languages.

Rust is great for memory safety and performance, though at a price as you nicely lay out.

Smalltalk is great for simplicity, elegance, low (or practically nonexistent) cognitive overhead, ease of learning, ease of use, and most important of all, productivity.

Smalltalk is an astonishingly small language. It only has 6 reserved words. The complete syntax can fit on a post card. Videos exist that can teach you all of Smalltalk syntax within a few minutes!

In 2017, Capers Jones, the world's leading expert on software metrics, published a study that showed Smalltalk the most productive of all the major programming languages (JavaScript, Lisp, C++, Go, Java, Python, C#, Ruby, etc.). This study, based on millions of lines of code for thousands of projects over 79 languages, represents the largest dataset of its kind.

The beauty of Smalltalk lies in its graphical live programming environment unmatched by anything else in the IT community.

Rust and Smalltalk, a match made in heaven!