It all depends on what part you want to work with. But some understanding of the close to hardware aspects of rust wouldn't hurt, comes in handy for debugging and optimising.

But I say that as somone who has a background (and job) in hard realtime c++ (writing control software for industrial vehicles). We recently did our first Rust project as a test at work though! I hope there will be more. But the question then becomes how to teach 200+ devs (over time, gradually presumably). For now it is just like 3 of us who know rust and are pushing for this and a few more that are interested.