Oxide is a personal project that takes inspiration from the principles discussed in "Notes on a Smaller Rust" and its follow-up, "Revisiting a 'smaller Rust'". It aims to explore a new language design that simplifies and optimizes the development process while inheriting Rust's best qualities.
Not for me. It is clearly not trying to be a systems programming language. And that is why I'm interested in Rust. I work in hard realtime (day job) and do embedded as a hobby.
That rust is also useful higher up the stack is just a nice bonus to me which means I can keep using it when writing automation things that are too complex for a simple shell script (it has largely replaced python for this purpose for me now).
Rust gained momentum because it filled a niche that was unoccupied (systems capable but safe and high level). Oxide seems to be aiming for an area already occupied by Rust from one side and things like Go from the other side. That rarely works out.