The empirical data from Go's package ecosystem is drawn from a corpus with sophisticated package management: dep. The argument is that dep is unnecessarily powerful and that a simpler approach will suffice. The evidence supports that argument. Note that this is not an argument about Cargo, or Bundler, or any thing else. Right now, the ecosystem is using dep, and there is evidence that it can be done simpler.
To stick with your analogy, I think it's fair to conclude that the only vehicles users need on bike trails are bikes.
Additionally, I have done an analysis of two Rust projects that have been brought up in my discussions on this issue. Specifically, LALRPOP and exa. In both cases, throughout the entire history of the project (hundreds of changes over 4-5 years), Cargo only had to select the largest semver compatible version [1]. Again, I would love to find examples of projects where this strategy was not sufficient.
[1] There is one complication: in Cargo, a ^ constraint (the default kind) on a v0 dependency is only good up to the minor version. In other words, ^0.1.0 means >=0.1.0 and <0.2.0, where ^1.0.0 means >=1.0.0 and <2.0.0. Selecting the largest semver compatible version is meant in this way because of the community norms around breakage in v0. In an MVS world, any breaking change is a major version bump, and would have the same properties, but with different version strings.
