It’s a better, more modern language in general. It has way better tooling (better, more user friendly compiler, better package manager), really good set of modern features (null-safety, good error handling, type-classes, algebraic types), it’s easier to modularize your code (workspaces, modules). Rust does a lot of things right and is fun to work with. That’s why it’s the most liked language overall. It’s not hype, it really is that good. It will just make working on the kernel easier. And on top of that it offers some memory safety and concurrency features.

P.S. I forgot about amazing documentation. Again, way better then what you can find for C.

P.P.S Zero cost abstractions.