It seems to me that some of the empirical evidence and especially the methodology (esp. using downloads is a questionable metric) behind it is under question. Many of the crates are also quite large ones.
Are we ignoring the signal? In my view things like Tracking issue for eRFC 2497, "if- and while-let-chains, take 2" · Issue #53667 · rust-lang/rust · GitHub are in fact responding to the signal by extending control flow in the language to support a common use case.
Rust is opinionated about lots of things. For example, we do not have exceptions (we have some sugar, those are great, but those are not the same language feature as in e.g. Java). We don't have global type inference (a great feature if you ask me). I don't think it's very interesting whether we should be opinionated or not. I understand that you like this feature and we can discuss that, no problem.
But I do and have used it (I said so before...)? The crate exists and it seems to work, so why does it need to be elevated into the language (especially when it has maintainability drawbacks)?