Rust also comes with a very deep standard library for I/O, path manipulation etc whereas the C++ equivalents for all of this are still surprisingly lacking even in C++20 (especially on the network side).

I agree with this point and cross-platform development is painful in C and C++. However, one of the reasons people use C and C++ is because of platform specific development. It turns out the platforms themselves are written in C.

For example, the "very deep standard library" for Rust can't do DNS TXT queries. On Linux, I run 'man res_query' [1] and get the documentation. Notice the Synopsis, that's C/C++ and the Linux specific code I write can use that.

Rust can also call these functions but there is an impedance mismatch between the safe world of standard rust and the unsafe calls to the system -- I imagine that a crate is a available to ease the pain of the 'unsigned char *answer'.

I am not making this comment to belittle Rust, I actually think it is a good and safe alternative to C++. However, there is decades of system development behind the C/C++ ecosystem and coming onto a C/C++ thread (about a package manager) and calling things a "shitshow" is not going to win people over.

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/res_query.3.html