This isn't me glazing Rust, this is just the boring observation that a VM language is necessarily going to be outperformed by a language without a VM. VMs have good attributes, but they are never zero cost.

I also have years of experience with Rust, but I moved off Rust a few years back simply because I'm sick of the anemic stdlib and lack of mature ecosystem around anything even one inch off the beaten path. Cargo is a shitshow and Rust forces you into an npm-like experience for a whole bunch of functionality that ought to be included in the box. You're juggling libraries with versions like 0.1.2 of which there's seven, none of which are feature complete and five of which are semi abandoned. Then you run into the orphan rule trying to fix or extend any of them.

I kind of think some other language will come along, take the borrow checker, take all the type conveniences that Rust stole from OCaml that make Rust so nice, glue it all to a Python/Go/dotnet style fat stdlib, complete with an optional GC for all the things that don't actually need bare metal performance (just stick an arena in stdlib), and Rust will feel like a clunker by comparison.

Whereas Bethesda and Paradox (mainline strategy) games are examples of games that are intentionally moddable, with Cpp cores wrapping sanely defined content sandboxes.

Frankly I'd rather the C# style of modding didn't exist at all. It usually means the devs haven't thought about how mods should hook in at all, beyond "inject whatever you want and we'll break it on almost every update. Also, we don't have the resources to review mods so expect them to occasionally be/come malware. We take no responsibility even though we're literally the ones distributing the malware to you via our first party mod store."

[0] https://www.pcgamesn.com/cities-skylines-2/hacked-mod