Rust does have some nice semantics that the last round of popular languages don't, mostly just due to age. I suspect that a decent amount of its popularity is owed to that. But obviously for something CRUDesq all the nice little affordances in the world can't prevent borrowing from putting it way behind any language with a mature framework. That indicates we could use a GC language with Rust's eye towards modern design but without Rust's more difficult bits. Though I haven't really tried Typescript- does it do anything like that?