As shitty as C++ is from today's PoV, the entire gaming industry switched over within around 3 years towards the end of the 90s. 6..7 years is a long time, and a single engine (especially when it's more or less just a runtime without editor and robust asset pipeline) won't change the bigger picture that Rust is a pretty poor choice for gamedev.
Did they? What's your evidence? Are you including consoles?
Btw, the alternatives in the 1990s were worse than they are now, so the bar to clear for eg C or C++ were lower.
From what I've seen, around the late mid-90's, C++ usage was still rare, right before 2000 it was already common and most middleware didn't even offer C APIs anymore.
Of course a couple of years later Unity arrived and made the gamedev language choice more complicated again.
If we exclude AAA games, probably the vast majority of the games nowadays don't need manual memory management for the game core (C# was a popular choice, it seems). I guess that if one really needs manual memory management, languages with moderate memory safety would be a more appropriate choice (support libraries/frameworks being equal, which certainly aren't).
I've used Bevy, and ECS is not an appopriate choice for every game (I wouldn't actually advise it unless there is a specific need). It requires very careful design over the whole lifecycle (ECS-based games very easily tend to get a mess), which is exactly the opposite of one wants for rapid prototyping.
Making a nontrivial game with them is a wholly different story.