It wouldn't be at all the same thing anymore. The real purpose and challenge behind designing it was providing memory safety without a garbage collection scheme. If someone wants a high level language, Rust isn't a good fit. It's not ML with type classes. It's a C replacement.
It's not a bad thing for languages to be aimed at different niches. It doesn't reflect poorly on Rust that it's not a good fit as a high level language. It reflects badly on people misunderstanding the purpose of the language and the challenges that it has to solve in that space.
Garbage collection is an extremely core part of ML. If you look at Rust as ML with type classes, you're going to be very disappointed, because you're missing that the language is entirely designed around being low level with low-level control, no GC and zero cost abstractions.