Isn't the return type of a widget factory method obviously Widget? This doesn't seem like a great example. Of course the method name could be wrong and not enforced at the language level like something between angle brackets, but idk.

I really disagree with this characterization of the discussion. While there's plenty of more or less dispassionate comments focused on finding a solution, there's a greater number of people from the peanut gallery drowning that out with comments that amount to "I don't like this!" at best and questioning the integrity of dtonlay at worst. I feel like this demonstrates some of the worst features of open source software on github, where a bunch of nobodies feel the need to add their totally useless input rather than participating in good faith to find solutions and make the software better. You even see comments like that here, speculating that dtonlay is trying to break cargo and force people to use bazel, which is just an insanely conspiratorial and bad faith speculative interpretation that is obviously untrue and helps no one.