Rust could not work in a world where compilation was a single threaded affair. I think it exists now instead of in the 90’s and 00’s in good part because of this.

I don’t think it’s an accident that it has succeeded as multicore took over. We are now well past a point that a task that can be split with 70% efficiency into multiple parallel tasks is 5-10x faster than the optimal sequential solution. Expensive multicore machines existed when Rust was a baby but it didn’t really catch on until 4 core was common in consumer hardware. And now I have an ancient laptop with 16 cores.

But Rust is also good for producing correct code to run on those systems. So it benefits twice.