The comments gives a link to a recent talk about the motivation for using Rust in Git: https://github.com/bk2204/talk-rust-in-git/blob/dev/presenta...

I wouldn't agree with all of those reasons, but it's very definitely not "just for the sake of it." One of the better reasons so many people look to writing some things in Rust is that we now have pretty ample evidence than trying to write a binary file format parser in C is a cornucopia of CVEs that are just simply absent in Rust, and the excuse of "well, but a sufficiently smart programmer doesn't write bugs in C" doesn't cut it anymore.

fwiw, the use of C is infinitely more "coerced" than the use of Rust.

on my Linux system, C takes ownership of a 'top-level' /usr/include directory, all the kernel APIs have their canonical definitions in C headers, a lot of system features like nsswitch require dynamically linked C libraries etc. etc.

Rust is just something that programs can choose to be written in and that doesn't inconvenience me in any way.

Of the codebases i know that have adopted Rust, it has always been because some of their maintainers wanted to do so.

Maybe git's case is different though. Do you have more info about it? Are you a git maintainer who was coerced to use Rust, or do you know of such cases?

Is all use of Rust "coerced" and "forced on everyone", or is there a way to write things in it that makes sense?

I don't think it's "just for the sake of it". I think they believe that the Rust code will be safer.