Those of us who were programming in the nineties and before remember there was a lot of competition [1]; not less than today. It's just that not much of it survived to this day in any popular form. Also, C++ didn't have any stronger backer than Rust, at least not at first. (BTW, Go's introduction was closer in time to Python's or Java's than it is to today; both Go and Rust are already fairly old languages)
[1]: In the application space, there were VB, Delphi, Smalltalk, and a host of other so-called "RAD languages". In the scripting space, Perl was dominant. In the low-level space, we had the entire Pascal family, with Ada and, to a lesser extent, Oberon.
[1]: In the application space, there were VB, Delphi, Smalltalk, and a host of other so-called "RAD languages". In the scripting space, Perl was dominant. In the low-level space, we had the entire Pascal family, with Ada and, to a lesser extent, Oberon.