Hear me out, but I believe that using Rust holds Lemmy back.

Writing Rust code is difficult, and fairly time consuming. It's difficult to get right, and as other commenters have noted, Lemmy code seems to do a lot of things for the "hype factor" (like Websockets). It's difficult to find enough devs as well.

The article about Discord switching to Rust from Go in the top comment is misleading in my opinion. They totally rearchitected their service while rewriting it, so it's an apples to oranges comparision.

I've heard of SQL Island and SQL Police Department which appear to be in the same vein, but I haven't got any hands on experience with those two.

You must be a fan of the primeagen

This! Selfhosting your own small apps is the best way to get practical, hands on experience with Linux administration.