I'd like to read the other sides of the story; do you have any recommendations?
On the surface it sounds like a community with such deep pathology that it will take at least a generation following a complete change of leadership to have a chance at recovery. But there are three sides to every story.
> On the surface it sounds like a community with such deep pathology
First what sort of pathology? You're confusing community with leadership.
The community didn't want this, and leadership was doing a restructuring due to change from Foundation and Project. Welcome to OSS projects.
Second as opposed to what?
A community at the beck and call of your CEO dictator? I'm a Java dev, so all it takes for Java to die is for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison to decide that they (ORACLE) are inserting two mandatory ads to be watched during each Java compiler run. Or god forbid that they will monetize Java.
Plus if I had 24/7 insight into how Oracle worked, I'd probably also be much less inclined to join Java as a new dev.
To paraphrase Tolstoy: (All perfect languages are dead;) Each imperfect language is imperfect in its own way.
I can try to answer your questions if they are important to you, but it will require some significant effort, so I'd like to be sure they aren't rhetorical first.
Honestly, I'm wondering what kind of pathology do you see that isn't just a community stereotype, and that won't change with the influx of new programmers?
And how does it differ from the average Open-Source Project?
The particular kind of pathology I see here is a strong centralization of the Rust community under the control of an unaccountable leadership caste. The point of free-software licensing is to minimize the control "owners" of software have over their users, protecting those users from abuses by leaders. Somehow Rust users seem to have, to a significant extent, abdicated the rights guaranteed to them by the software license.
For example, in your example of "inserting two mandatory ads to be watched during each Java compiler run", the OpenJDK license guarantees your right to remove those ads from your copy of javac, and to redistribute that copy of javac as the official Debian or Ubuntu version of javac. F-Droid does this routinely to such "antifeatures" in open-source Android applications, and of course Android itself exists because the open-source licenses of projects like Harmony, IDEA, and Eclipse protect Google from such malfeasance.
I'm not sure what the "average open-source project" is. Maybe something like https://github.com/justinasr/FantilatorOS/, the firmware for a redundant array of 64 inexpensive muffin fans that someone set up at CERN? https://web.archive.org/web/20231010215437/https://onlyfans.... Or https://github.com/antimatter15/splat, a Gaussian splat renderer in WebGL? I think those are both "non-average" in that they have a very above-average number of forks and stars. But, like the overwhelming majority of open-source projects, neither of them has a community in any meaningful sense, so I think the question doesn't make sense, given that it's a question about community dynamics.
On the surface it sounds like a community with such deep pathology that it will take at least a generation following a complete change of leadership to have a chance at recovery. But there are three sides to every story.