Why does Rust need the `if let` syntax?

Question

Coming from other functional languages (and being a Rust newbie), I\'m a bit surprised by the motivation of Rust\'s if let syntax. The RFC mentions that without

Answer 1

A quote from a related issue against The Rust Programming Language:

You'd better think about if let as a one-handed match with no exhaustive checking enforced. It often has nothing to do with if or let, that's why it is so confusing. :)

Maybe it would be better to rename the whole operator, call it match once or something like that.

(slightly modified to make sense without the context)