‘Worse is better’ came from a Common Lisp guy from MIT back in 1991, describing the success of C and UNIX.

It’s really not just that Rust is new and C is old. Compare Rust with Go, for example. Go is a fairly modern example of a ‘worse is better’ language.

Back in 1970s when C was invented, Lisp had been around for over a decade. C came out the same year as smalltalk, a year before ML, and 3 years before Scheme.

Rust is a very modern language, though. There’s no way we could have had it in the 70s; many of its language features hadn’t been invented yet. But it very much depends on MIT style research languages for its basis.