As a long time ruby enjoyer and now also rust enjoyer, the core syntax and systems of rust are very rubyesque in a lot of ways, you can tell that some of the core contributors liked the language.
yeah ruby API ideas and the _why poignant guide specifically, they were very influential in programming in general. a number of early rust devs came from ruby as well. all original authors of cargo worked on ruby's bundler earlier. etc
The claim is that Rust took espression-orientation from Ruby. That's unlikely - it is much more inspired by FP languages which are also expression oriented.
Ah, you're right, I definitely misread that the first time. I think the only thing that Rust probably was directly inspired by Ruby on was the syntax for closures (which is not exactly the same, but when the closure uses a block rather than returning an expression directly it's similar, and I vaguely recall seeing something about that being intentional).