Yesterday, we had a presentation at $DAYJOB, where we showed off our software project at a high level to another department. That department does lots of low-level work, including with C.
A team lead from that department, who knows our project, had provided the initial draft for the presentation slides. And they threw a sentence at the end of the slides "By the way: $PROJECT powered by Rust". We were also not the only project there, which explicitly mentioned Rust, even though it wasn't strictly relevant.
And yeah, that's just kind of insane to me. When even management understands that their techies get excited about working with Rust, that's not anymore just a few select voices that call for it. That's a whole department discontent with C, where an alternative is presented.
Which is why I would be extremely surprised, if not something similar happened with the Linux kernel.
Obviously, those who've coded C for twenty years might not understand the issue, but there's so many people for which low-level development becomes accessible for the first time with Rust. The stream of people wanting to contribute Rust code will just not cut off any time soon.