Yep, agree with all of that. I chose to make a tiny website because it was a real need, a small project which is representative of the work I would be doing in Rust (writing kernel drivers doesn't come up much for me), and it would expose me quickly to what my life would be like.

There are a few web frameworks, HTML templating engines, and all kinds of crates, and Rust is getting to be popular, so people must surely be using it for building "regular" web apps.

Funny what you say about just spitting out some HTML. This was my opinion of ASP.NET WebForms two decades ago, and I stuffed the fat book in the bin and didn't touch web dev again until Ruby on Rails had influenced the MS team to make ASP.NET MVC, which made a lot more sense, but was still bloated for what is largely a text reader/writer.