I agree that using Rust to build a web API is harder than in say Node/Rails/Django. However, you have to understand that Rust is a new language. Rails was first released in 2004 (and used in production before that) and Django in 2005. On the other hand, actix-web was first released in 2017, and the language itself went 1.0 just 5 years ago. The Rust web ecosystem is very young, and while there is a lot of work going on in this space, these things take time. Don't be too quick to judge - it doesn't make sense to write off Rust for mainstream web development yet.
All of this is important to point out, and I’d also add that async only hit stable Rust a little over a year ago! Over the past year Rust has finally felt like it’s in a good place to write web things in, which I find very exciting. I spent the summer in Rust, then in the Fall was back in a Go project, and I was really missing some Rust features when I had to make that switch (error handling with anyhow in particular!).
