The Rust community is a very diverse group of people with many different opinions. It is not a universal truth that the Rust community believes Rust to be an awful first language.

You don’t need to take my word for it. Google the topic and go through all the discussions. Even the ones in Rust’s own forum get mixed responses, and that community is by its very nature very partial towards Rust.

Also, framing the discussion around newbies learning Rust as a first language is a strawman. The question is not whether if someone without any prior experience in programming can or cannot make and effort and write code in Rust. The question is which language to learn.

There are many programming languages to pick and choose from, and some are renowned to be very beginner friendly. Rust is not one of them.

If you want to make a case for Rust, it’s up to you to prove that Rust is a better language to take first steps than any other programming language around. In my personal opinion, it is simply not possible to claim that Rust is better for this particular usecase than quite a sizable set of programming languages, including but not limited to Python. If you want to claim Rust is better suited then you need to make a case for it, and that is a challenging thing to pull off.