I am pretty certain that most of high level use cases for Rust could be replaced with Swift, with increased developer velocity, if Swift was actually cross platform. And that's coming from a Rust fan. It will be interesting to see how effective this rewrite is.

I don't know if you can write high-throughput systems with 100% reference counted GC. Swift is targeted at UI work pretty hard.

You could take a look a swift-nio (https://github.com/apple/swift-nio) which is a pretty high-throughput system. swift-nio does this using some reference-counted GC where it simplifies the code and doesn't affect performance. Otherwise, value-types are used which incur no GC overhead (unless they are copy-on-write, and backed by something that requires reference counting).