Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, what's actually nice is the correctness. The low-levelness is not helpful for most of the software I write, and imposes a constant burden. Rust, of course superbly achieves its goals within its niche! But it is a niche, is my meaning here. What I actually want is code that's correct, but ergonomic to write. So my ideal language (as strange as it sounds) would be Rust with a GC. I don't want to worry…
There are an endless number of modern MLs that do the same thing. That's not a novelty - Rust was novel in making it part of a low-level language.
Having great tools. Excellent documentation. Being friendly to new users.
Yes, it's also a systems language without a runtime. But that's not the novel part. You could write horrors in C++ that approximate ML even without language support. There are eldritch libraries where some kind of pattern matching is done via generic lambdas.
The main difference is developper UX. Good tools, good error messages, quality of life. The novelty is making ML not painful.