[kibwen]

Most of the high-profile departures from the compiler happened in the wake of the 2018 edition (the first new edition since 1.0, and the edition that had to invent the very notion of "edition"), where a lot of people pushed themselves far too hard to deliver on what would be, in retrospect, far too aggressive of a release deadline. The edition just barely made it out in the 2018 calendar year, after getting delayed a handful of times, but it resulted in massive burnout among those contributing to its features, including the person who wrote the comment linked above. In practice Rust has actually been recovering quite nicely over the past few years after reaching a nadir of volunteer motivation in 2019; https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pulse/monthly tells me that 178 discrete authors have contributed to just the rust-lang/rust repo over the past month.