> very few and small geographic parts of the world
There's reasonably good data about this that contradicts this?
$1000 as a day rate isn't unusual or unreasonable for a specialist IT contractor; and I don't say that idly; I say it from both experience and you know; aggregated data:
Yes, if you want someone to slap a php website together (or javascript, or many other entry level frameworks), you can pay less.
...but that's not what they were asking; they were asking for a technically sophisticated analysis of an existing project and a performant re-implementation in rust.