also, to be clear, my current paid gig has got me learning a cut down toy version of rust that is dedicated to smart contracts

why i'm feeling ok about that is because what they removed from rust to make this language Move is all the things that are wrong with Rust in a substantial way - the objects, most of the Option, almost all of the dependencies, most of the complicated types (only unsigned integers, imagine!) and i sorta understand the logic of the hand holding the GC stuff in rust