Yes it is, for many use cases.

I'd argue the syntax is much simpler, more modern, and perhaps even more consistent (the fact that in TeX you can change the meaning of the escape symbol or the comment symbol is pure insanity IMHO). It can use any font, and the feature you know from LaTeX, a compiler, is free. Only the web application has some premium features. It's more like Overleaf. It's also several orders of magnitudes faster and has actually helpful error messages.

The fact that it was written in Rust is less than secondary.

Also, TeX was written in WEB, not C.