As I already mentioned multiple times, the future are tracing GCs with an ownership concept for niche use cases.
Rust's ideal use case are the scenarios that use stuff like MISRA-C, kernel and drivers code.
The design team has done a wonderful work pushing for affine types into mainstream, however outside of forbidden-GC scenarios, the productivity loss versus any kind of automatic memory management approach, isn't worth it.
Single ownership and deterministic destruction are quite useful on their own though, outside of just memory management. I wouldn't call them niche. Rust makes use of them all the time.
Deterministic destruction is obviously very useful for resource management, and not just files and database handles, but also locks and scope guards.
Single ownership allows working with mutable data without dangers of shared mutability. Without it you either need true immutability, or defensive coding by proactively copying inputs to ensure nobody else can unexpectedly mutate data you have a reference to.
Single ownership also happens to nicely enforce interfaces that require functions to be called only once or that objects can't be used in invalid state, e.g. after a call to .deinit() or after intermediate steps in builders/fluent interfaces/iterator chains.
The problem may be with the fuzzy conceptual notion of "systems language" that is the starting point of many of these languages that end up with effectively conflicting set of goals.
(I agree with Animats comment elsewhere in this thread blessing all threaing models as "OK in isolation". It's just they don't play well together in a single language.)
The OSes designed at Xerox PARC, ETHZ, Microsoft Research, Olivetti, UK Navy, some of which used for quite some time in production, were quite clear, there wasn't any fuzziness on them.
Rust's ideal use case are the scenarios that use stuff like MISRA-C, kernel and drivers code.
The design team has done a wonderful work pushing for affine types into mainstream, however outside of forbidden-GC scenarios, the productivity loss versus any kind of automatic memory management approach, isn't worth it.