[wavemode]

I don't think it's quite as circular as you're making it sound. If someone has a prior contraint of needing to move quickly (which is common in startups) it can make sense to choose any arbitrary technology, if it allows them to do so. I don't think someone developing a new game in C++ necessarily has no concerns about C++, that's just the language that all the console SDKs use. I don't think someone doing data science in Python necessarily likes Python, that's just the language that most models and libraries use (and that person probably has a deadline to publish a paper!)

Another factor to consider is that, if one is indeed trying to reuse code from existing databases (regardless of the reason for doing so), code from projects like Sqlite and FoundationDB is simply far less likely to contain serious bugs than any newer Rust-based option. There are way more mistakes one can make when writing a database than just memory safety mistakes, and the mistakes tend to be extremely subtle. Code having been run in production for long periods of time under significant amounts of load is basically a fundamental prerequisite for it to make any sense to trust the data of your users to it.