The only popular crate that I can think of that still requires nigthly is Rocket[0], the 0.5 release does not but the lack of maintenance means that it has been three years since 0.4 and months since the last update. In that time Warp, Axum, Tide, Actix and many more frameworks that are all on stable has eaten its lunch. As for long compile times, I agree, it has gotten heaps better but is still far from Go (nor will it ever get that good), but for most my projects with incremental debug builds its in the ballpark of ~2 seconds, which is good enough for me and `cargo check` is close to instant. Release builds, yeah, they are slow.

[0]: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket