If I had to guess why HN is so attracted to Rust, there's a few things that compound on each other.
Rust occupies a point in the design space that no other language does. Statically verified memory safety, strong concurrency guarantees, a world class toolchain, and it compiles to native machine code. Before Rust you always had to sacrifice one of these. Go gives you safety and ergonomics but you're garbage collected and limited in expressiveness. C++ gives you performance but safety is entirely your problem. Rust is the first mainstream language to credibly offer all of it.
The toolchain is the part people underestimate. As someone from C++, I cannot overstate how much this matters. Our toolchain is literally cobbled together ancient runes. Package management is strange and archaic. You can't just add a package to your project. There are stacks of contrived and obscure rules that must be followed. The language itself is a hodgepodge of inconsistencies layered on each other over decades. Some codebases are hundreds of macro incantations deep. Some prefer overload maxxing, default constructor shenanigans, uninitialized memory. Macros aren't even part of the language, it's a file preprocessor glued on from the side. Headers and implementations are stitched together. System dependency management is hell on earth. Build systems are fragmented: CMake vs Meson vs Bazel vs Make vs Ninja, pick your poison. I could keep going.
Meanwhile Rust just works. You add a package in a few seconds. Compile to seven different platforms out of the box, including the web. Type references just work, nothing to forward declare. Cargo is your build system, package manager, test runner, doc generator, and publisher in one coherent thing. That entire category of bikeshedding that has plagued C++ for decades just doesn't exist. It's heaven on earth.