I believe most successes of languages happen because of corporate backing and tooling/library ecosystem rather than language. It's not like most people are using Java because they are in love with the language features.

Personally I also think that if you removed memory safety overnight from Rust, people will still use it. Rust is appealing not because it's memory safe. For some uses it is, but most people flock to Rust because it offers an alternative to C++ without fifty years of accumulated cruft. Rust is a modern language, with a well working package manager/build tool and a wide ecosystem of libraries for every usecase. Memory safety and other features are just a cherry on the top. If Rust used garbage collection I am sure it would also be very popular just because of those other things.

Other languages like D or Nim tried to fit into that space also, but they don't have the budget to really make it. Most of work on those languages is done by unpaid volunteers, so there's little direction and there's a lot of one man projects.