I agree with you as long as you don't know C++ first. I actually teach C++ and Rust to students who only know Java, and they have a much easier time picking up Rust. It's the people who approach Rust with C++ idioms who have the wort time with it. It comes down to the tooling, especially Cargo being the one-stop-shop for everything Rust. Another poster here laments that Cargo is too overloaded with disjoint functionality, but that's actually a benefit for a lot of learners.