As far as what attracted troons to Rust, I'm quite sure I have no idea.

Primarily because Rust was developed at Mozilla after it was infested by troons. So they latched on to it early because it was their baby (even though it was actual talented non-troon computer scientists that made it).

But also because they gravitate to rules and authoritarian systems so the more rules and the less choices in the language the better for them. They're generally not very intelligent so they want the guardrails to not make stupid choices. Paint by numbers.

Another one like this is Google's Go language. Rob Pike was at least troon-adjacent himself, but it attracted more than a normal share of weirdos because it dictated source formatting and file organization and a bunch of other arbitrary decisions for no good reason. They love arbitrary rules.