Trying things out with an ESP32 and i might opt for Rust after reading what you have wrote. There also seems to be enough resources to do that. I started using C++ as the Arduino IDE has decided that for me more or less. I suspect setting up a local development environment is also easier with Rust. (?!) I at least had problem Setting up C++ in VSCodium.

Don't like OOP as the next guy but sometimes its the right tool i feel like and i do have that case right now. So its great that Rust seems to have that as well to some extent. Actually as Rust is so much more readable i kinda expected to give up on some control but that doesn't seem to be the case. :)