Nit: One engineer at a company saying something is not the same as that whole company saying something. I wish they would just say "Google employee insists..."
Make sense. Firmware is also extra difficult to debug so it's nice to use a language that significantly reduces the amount of debugging you need to do.
I want to see specific examples of serious bugs that rust would catch that clang -Weverything, clazy/clang-tidy and scan-build would not find for C++... because I'm still not convinced it is anywhere near worth learning at all for career/veteran C and C++ folks.