I'm a bit surprised by the fact no one on the team heard about it to be honest...
The first working release of kickstart was Feb 15 and cargo-generate Jul 17. Since this was a project about cargo templates, I assumed the pre-RFC Cargo Templates thread was the right place to post it (I also mentioned it a couple of times in Reddit in the what are you working on this week but those ones are easy to miss). Since you mentioned no one working on cargo-generate had heard of it before, I assume no one read that thread.
What is the right way to publicize a MVP for a feature if a RFC thread is not?