Fast all the way down, especially when coupled with REPL tooling.
Also, writing JavaScript for the backend is needlessly underperforming for anything with any load.
Node dependencies are fine, add an npmrc file to have it default to exact versioning and you solve 90% of common day to day problems. It's not ideal, but nor is cargo's mystery meat approach to importing optional features from packages.
See OCaml or Haskell, they also have interpreters and REPLs as part of their tooling.
Also there should be no need to always compile crates from scratch when starting a new project.
Which ironically circles back to your remark of having a similar problem.