Rust just doesn't work for a lot of applications. Things like GUI toolkits, Web browsers, game engines are a pain to write without true OOP. Yes, it's "overly complicated" at this point after about 40 years of development, buts it's still top 3 of the TIOBE index after all these years for a reason.
Of course Rust can handle those use cases fine (GUIs, web browsers, and game engines).
C++ is still high on the TIOBE index mainly because it is indeed old and used in a lot of legacy systems. For new projects, though, there's less reason to choose C++.
Web browsers, yes. With GUIs and games, it's a less clear. Of course you can write GUIs and games in any Turing complete language but there's still a lot of work to be done in finding the right ergonomics in Rust [1, 2].
It's still high because it solves real world problems, so it's still the gold standard for anything ranging from systems programming to scientific computing.
I think you’ve misidentified the reason this stuff is harder in Rust and it has nothing to do with “true OOP” if by that you mean class based inheritance. The primary challenge is mapping how GUIs are traditionally mutated onto Rust semantics. Even then, efforts like Slint show it’s eminently feasible so I’m not sure your argument holds.
It’s important to remember that c++ has a 30 year head start on Rust, especially at a crucial growth part of computing. Thats why it tops the TIOBE index. But I fully expect it to go the way of COBAL sooner rather than later where most new development does not use c++.
If anything OOP might actually be detrimental to many game engine applications (in a modern computing context in regards to the kind of data layouts and implementation patterns it encourages), and traits and "traditional" OOP (if you exclude implementation inheritance, which is largely cursed anyways) are real close together anyways, I think Rust is a great fit specifically for game engines at least, for gameplay programming I'm not as certain but for anything where you're mostly managing essentially data pipelines that need to go very fast and be reliable and not crashy, Rust is a great fit.
