Rust and Cargo were built to be in a symbiosis with each other.

NPM is an afterthought of a rushed language.

I would disagree. Especially since unlike npm every part of cargo was through through with all the experience and knowledge gained from npm, pip, nuget & co.

I have a LOT more problems with npm over cargo. Also it's 1 tool and not 100 different tools to do the same job (npm, pnpm, yarn, bun, deno, etc...)