The Rust community is not perfect. Neither is the LLVM community nor the GCC community, not any Open Source community. Consider the recent drama / growing pains that has occurred within the Rust community. Everyone has biases and conflicts of interest. Anyone who doesn't recognize the benefit of alternatives will learn the hard way.
The Rust community rationalization that they don't need / want alternatives for "reason" is self-serving and all about control. I don't care if someone is the BDFL, they aren't right 100% of the time and not always doing things for altruistic reasons. The Rust community has imbued the leadership with some godlike omniscience and altruism because it makes them feel good, not because it's sound policy.
There's a long distance between "perfect" and "conflicts of interest", the latter bears more resemblance to corruption than imperfection.
Of course rust leadership is going to make and has made mistakes, I'm confident every BDFL ever has also made and will continue to make mistakes, the same goes for the 'herd' of clang/gcc/msvc/... and the herd of browser makers. The target is not perfection, but merely being better than the alternative.
I think that, in the absence of conflicts of interests, single source of truth models (e.g. what rust rust/python/java/... does) are likely to do better than 'herd' of competing implementation models (C/C++/javascript) at making a good language. The latter probably does better at working despite conflicts of interest, but that's not a problem with most programming languages where there is relatively (compared to the browser ecosystem) little opportunity for a powerful corporation to push their interest to the detriment of others.
I think the rust community is quite clear that the rust leadership is flawed, but that's not very interesting without a way to make leadership better. If you can convince people you have that way - you'll get a lot of interest.
The Rust community rationalization that they don't need / want alternatives for "reason" is self-serving and all about control. I don't care if someone is the BDFL, they aren't right 100% of the time and not always doing things for altruistic reasons. The Rust community has imbued the leadership with some godlike omniscience and altruism because it makes them feel good, not because it's sound policy.