I just discovered that we both may have been wrong.
Looks like you can skip the AfC review process entirely and this is given the go-ahead by Wikipedia (it's not frowned upon).
Basically, you have to create a Draft-namespace article (for example, Draft:Rust).
Then, once you have auto confirmed privileges (10 edits and 4 days account age), you can move the page namespace from the Draft namespace to the (Article) namespace...
Looks like you can skip the AfC review process entirely and this is given the go-ahead by Wikipedia (it's not frowned upon).
Basically, you have to create a Draft-namespace article (for example, Draft:Rust).
Then, once you have auto confirmed privileges (10 edits and 4 days account age), you can move the page namespace from the Draft namespace to the (Article) namespace...
... and that should create the article. Hmm.