My experience (and I admit I may be too biased given years of prior C/C++ experience) is that Rust's syntax is a necessity, since no other mainstream languages besides C/C++ are as low-level as Rust.
Most mainstream languages have a GC, and don't support distinguishing between values on the stack or references, don't need to deal with lifetimes or don't provide the safety you get with them, etc.
I'm curious though, could you give an example of syntax you consider convoluted, and how you would do it instead?
I do depend on their features, and I see the value in doing that.
For example, at $WORK I had to reimplement Apache's mod_rewrite.c in Rust, and I made it 100x faster for our particular use-case.
I could've done that in C as well, sure, but the simplicity of the C language just moves the complexity to the code itself; whereas, with Rust, I whipped out a prototype in just 3 days, and was able to freely pass around pointers to data, with zero allocations, zero copying, and every time it compiled I knew it was guaranteed to be safe.
You can't get that safety in C. You can't get that speed in Java.
You can't do this in any other language that does not have these features. I absolutely agree that the syntax is horrible... but I see no other way to achieve this.