Likewise, with Rust it is a relief after Go. In Go interfaces are a massive part of the language and they can only be pointers, which means much of your programming experience holds mental overhead needed to frequently answer "is this variable safe? Can I access it, or might it be nil?".

There's definitely overhead in learning how to use the borrow checker, but I feel that's the same as any basic language features in any language. Once learned, I largely don't think of them, and I don't fear using variables or what is concurrently safe anymore.