Also how I interpreted it, though even there it's quite weird (e.g. better performances is also a common reason to convert things to Rust, especially when "easy binding" tools like pyo3, neon, or rustler are available and take care of the unsafe bits between the two).
On the other hand, performance isn't a unique thing Rust brings to the party, C or C++ both have attractive performance in the same ballpark. So if the question is "Why Rust specifically?" rather than e.g. "Couldn't I technically use an awk script?" then safety is a better argument than performance.
Rather than memory safety per se, I'd actually value Rust's type safety over Python's. Yes, strictly speaking Python is dynamically typed rather than untyped, but Rust will shift a lot of your mistakes "hard left" (ie report your goof during compilation not during execution) compared to Python because it gets to do these checks up front, and it is also able to catch a lot more of them because it's much stricter about what types are.
In Python we can write "if foo" and it doesn't matter too much what type foo actually has, Python will try to decide if it's "truthy" at runtime. In Rust either foo is a boolean, in which case this is a reasonable thing to do, or it isn't, that's a type mismatch, your program doesn't compile. Not everyone loves this, but I certainly do.
