In the beginning, yes, this is true. But most people learn within a month or two which design patterns lead to problems with the borrow checker and which work smoothly, and often this knowledge translates to good design in languages like C and C++ as well.

If you're fighting the borrow checker in Rust, you'd probably have been fighting segfaults and use-after-free in C / C++. I'd rather spend 30 minutes fighting the borrow checker than spend 4 hours digging around in Valgrind.

> Type signatures are littered with lifetime annotations.

You cannot avoid the concept of lifetimes, without a garbage collector. If you don't want garbage collection, you have to deal with them.

Having explicit lifetime annotations in the code is _vastly_ better than trying to track the lifetimes in your head from scratch every time.