[tene]

For most people working a career as a programmer, how much of their time in that career is going to be spent as an inexperienced beginner programmer?

I agree that Rust is a professional tool, designed for professional use. It's designed for professional use, instead of being optimized for inexperienced beginners like Python is.

I just don't really see "inexperienced beginners can easily contribute productively to this code base" as something that would have been valuable for any of the professional work I've done over the past couple of decades of my career.

If you're an amateur, or if you're programming recreationally, or if you're writing some low-reliability low-impact throwaway code, sure, it's great to use happy-path-oriented languages. When you want to write something that people actually rely on to run a business, you should use professional-grade tools instead.