The rust borrow checker has been described in trivial terms many times. The first time I had it explained, as I recall, was as a book.

You own a book.

`&` - You can lend others the book, they can't fuck with it. `&mut` - You can lend the book to one person, they can fuck with it `move` - You give someone else the book, it's theirs now

Or `many reader NAND one writer`

Is this a complete explanation? No. But it's quite simple and you can be plenty productive with just this amount of understanding.

Your experience is not my experience. I used Rust for the first project I wrote as an intern after dropping out, having never used it before, and I even used it to interact with mysql, which I had never used before.

At my last company I had multiple people pick up rust in a matter of days.

I'm not denying rust as being difficult, I'm saying it's easy for some and hard for some. I found it easy, I was writing productive code on day 0 with virtually no preparation other than that I wanted to try it out. Many people find it easy. Obviously some people, many people, find it hard. Life's weird like that.