If he says that Rust is helping Linux maintainers to do their work more effectively, that is great news for Linux. I am excited to see the work advance.
I was skeptical of Rust until I gave the language a try for Advent of Code one year. I found it interesting, but I was uncertain about how it would work in a real codebase.
Later at $JOB, I migrated a troublesome C codebase to Rust as an experiment and the results were eye-opening. We discovered errors in the C code we had not realized were present. We were able to structure the code in a way that was easier to understand. The rewritten code was slightly faster, but much easier to understand and maintain.
It really is a game changer.