Your CRUD API does not need zero-cost abstractions, and your Next.js landing page does not need memory safety guarantees. The todo app that talks to Supabase and renders some cards will be fine without a borrow checker.
I see it every week. Some dev on Twitter announces they're rewriting their Node.js service in Rust because "performance matters." Brother, your service has 12 users and the bottleneck is a SELECT * with no index. Rust won't fix that. A basic understanding of databases will.
The Rust Evangelism Strike Force has done incredible PR work. They've convinced an entire generation of developers that if you're not writing Rust, you're basically leaving performance on the table. And technically they're right. Your deadline and your users are on the table too, along with your sanity.
Rust is interesting to learn and teaches you about memory and systems programming. That is a good reason to learn it, even though your Express API does not need it.
Now, exceptions exist. Ruff rewrote Python linting in Rust and it's 10-100x faster. That was the right call. Linting runs millions of times a day across every save. Those milliseconds compound. That's a legitimate use case.
A SaaS dashboard has different needs from Ruff. You can ship it in TypeScript and still have time to go outside.