So I've just tinkered around a bit in Rust, and I'm not intimately familiar with the language. My experience has been pretty good, but I don't see how it's a good fit for the web domain. At least not the enterprisey, CRUD, business apps I'm used to building. I'd be curious to hear from people who have been using Rust for their web backends, though. Beyond the classic selling points of speed and safety, what benefits…
For us, the safety is the critical reason to choose Rust - particularly the thread-safety. Also the relatively small memory footprint compared to something like Java. Performance hasn't driven our decision at all - the number of requests per second is very low. It's correctness that matters.
We are a bit unusual because customers have locally deployed servers rather than servers managed by us, so bugs are harder to fix.
We haven't hired any developers specifically for their Rust experience, but have instead trained internally and now have a group of about 10 Rust developers working across a couple of projects. I would say that training like this has been relatively straightforward. One of our hires, a recent graduate, had some existing Rust experience with personal projects, and this was particularly beneficial in helping the team to bootstrap.
The ecosystem is surprisingly mature. Async is probably still shaking out somewhat, but that's moved on hugely in the last couple of years, and we haven't had any particular problems.
Overall the experience has been hugely positive.
The biggest barrier to adoption, in my opinion, is that people are scared of learning Rust because it has a reputation as being difficult. I don't think it's any harder to master than some other major languages such as C++ or Java - although perhaps you have to understand more at the beginning: ownership and borrowing are right in your face.