You've said it yourself - evangelism, the spreading of the Rust gospel through the act of public preaching. :-) Most technologies don't have this, thank goodness. With Rust, I always have the feeling that I'm being "sold" something, even if I may have already bought it... On the positive side, it seems to be working and Rust does have technical merit, but I do hope that the community will mellow out with time and abandon this approach of trying to prove something.
Regarding technical merit, I like to think of Rust as a C++ with switches toggled in different ways and a borrow checker on top. It's complex to think in and to write in compared to C, but it's at the end of the day much easier to write correct code in. I won't go into all the details since that would take a long time, but I hope the kernel team will write about their difficulties with Rust once they encounter them, since that should be a very fun read.
Regarding Linus, I wanted to confirm to OP that their suspicions are not unfounded, because the other answers seem a bit like gaslighting to me, especially the one claiming it's a "weird question". There is definitely more to this than technical merit, but it doesn't have to be anything ill-natured from the Rust community. My theory is that Linus' spirit has been probably broken by the corporations controlling Linux development through their many commits, his getting older and grassroots support for Rust.
Regarding technical merit, I like to think of Rust as a C++ with switches toggled in different ways and a borrow checker on top. It's complex to think in and to write in compared to C, but it's at the end of the day much easier to write correct code in. I won't go into all the details since that would take a long time, but I hope the kernel team will write about their difficulties with Rust once they encounter them, since that should be a very fun read.
Regarding Linus, I wanted to confirm to OP that their suspicions are not unfounded, because the other answers seem a bit like gaslighting to me, especially the one claiming it's a "weird question". There is definitely more to this than technical merit, but it doesn't have to be anything ill-natured from the Rust community. My theory is that Linus' spirit has been probably broken by the corporations controlling Linux development through their many commits, his getting older and grassroots support for Rust.