Great question! I think the fundamentally hard problem with distributed systems (at least for me!) comes down to the complicated distributed state machines you have to manage rather than the memory management problems. I think async rust gets in my way with respect to these problems more than it helps (especially when it comes to raft or paxos). That being said with the new async Zig, I’ve been excitedly implementing a swappable backend for the core database that I hope will be a nice marriage of performance and ergonomics.
The idea is good, but the project isn't open. So I assume a rust fork will come out under MIT with these ideas, which can be the wider community adopted version.
Possibly, Amazon and Google also made the ability for smaller startup based DB companies to go that route with things like ValKey and OpenSearch. LLMs have made it super easy to transpile the ideas into whatever programming language you please though, you just have to put in the time.