They are hiring. I've seen one role listed for more than a year, and it's because of their hiring process. Here's a random job, by way of example: https://canonical.com/careers/3433732/application Search for "how did you perform", and be baffled at their recruitment strategy.
Not true though. Internally they can “shell out” to sub-tasks that know how to do specific things. The specific things don’t have to be models.
(I’m specifically talking about commercial hosted ones that have the capability i describe - obviously your run of the mill one downloaded off of the internet cannot do this).
You can still do “unsafe” stuff in rust, and people do. It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. And you don’t have to deal with a borrow checker, and a very small pool of developers available to hire.
4000 times faster is hardly difficult if you’re not trying to be ACID compliant. I can write to a flat file that doesn’t give a shit about integrity very quickly - it’s not a boast.
I wish things were as easy as they were with X11. Being able to ssh into a box and “export DISPLAY=192.168.0.7:0.0” then start an app and have it show up locally is just magical.
Sheffield in the UK has tram trains - it was the first such implementation in the UK, and runs on national rail lines as part of the journey to Rotherham.