Rust still does this in all sorts of silly ways, such as the ! type. What's the point of wasting an entire symbol that could have plenty of alternate uses on something that's so rarely used and could easily be defined as either a library type (empty enum) or at least be given a custom keyword, such as `never`? (Introduce it over an edition boundary, if you must preserve backwards compatibility.) The fact that it involves some compiler magic is no excuse; that's why Rust uses "langitem" markers within its core library.
I certainly don't disagree that Rust has flaws, for sure. I think this particular one is pretty far down the list, though. I'm not sure what else I'd want to use ! for, and by virtue of it not being used so often means that it's much less of a pain than @T would have been, though I would also argue that 2012 Rust used ~T and @T far more than contemporary Rust does (I still remember pcwalton's mailing list post about how you didn't have to use ~ for comparing strings!) and so was even more painful at the time than would be now.
```
export function never(message?: string): never {
throw new Error(message ?? 'Reached an impossible state');
const [foo = never()] = dbQueryThatReturnsOne();
```
I guess it's en par with .unwrap()