The way I'd put it is, I'd be much more confident in the ability of an open source project to survive receiving contributions from the general public if it were written in Rust rather than C++.
Yes! This has been my view on Rust for a while -- it's a relatively inexpensive way to boost productivity and general security of projects. This is especially true when the alternative is formal verification, which is less ergonomic than Rust and effectively would require a rewrite of C code anyway.