Well, it depends on how you weight the alternatives. Rust's advantage over C++ is its memory safety. Go is similar (I'm not sure if its safety guarantees are as strong as Rust, I should read up on that...), and it's advantage over Rust is that its type system is easier to get started with, but its disadvantage is requiring garbage collection. D is closer to C++ than Rust is, but has amazing metaprogramming, and defaults to GC, though it's not mandatory.
If none of these things matter to you, then they do seem similar. But if they do matter, then the difference is much larger.
If none of these things matter to you, then they do seem similar. But if they do matter, then the difference is much larger.