That's a completely different industry, I think.

> The added cruft, not so much. We have generics! We have type theory! We have lambdas! We have functional programming! We have threads! We have futures! We have async!

Generics, lambdas, and threads are must-have basics. Futures and async are the same thing. Rust doesn't "have functional programming", unless you mean chaining `map` and `collect` methods, in which case Java also has functional programming.

HTTP and error handling are third-party libraries. Multiple choices in this area are a direct result of not trying to bundle the kitchen sink with the language. These things don't standardize in a year.