May be an assumption on my part, but the language "people prefer to live in dense urban environment" is typical of urbanism-boosters - who definitely push a lot online that leads one to believe that anything less than inner Tokyo is unacceptable.
I’m a little suspicious of this because every startup says that they don’t hire the next engineer, they hire the next great engineer.
I think a lot of the value is taking the ordinary engineers (by hacker news) and letting them actually do something. Staying small helps this, because you are not thinking of the business ops burden of not building microservices. You’re building your single dockerized app.
"competent" is a bit of a word there, there are very few shops right now that are willing to hire actually junior rust devs. The jobs are out there but they're all for mid level at a minimum roles in the Rust ecosystem specifically.
Tons of people would jump ship to be able to use Rust, it has a lot of love in the community.
"Being totally unwilling to accept anyone junior, or who is new to the stack" is a disease in this industry, and it's really apparent when some 200 person+ company is only hiring principal level rust devs.