That Niko's text-arrow lifetime annotations are so helpful here suggests a rust IDE could offer similar highlighting or annotations to explain borrow checker errors.

One of the ergonomic hurdles to rust adoption by experienced C++ users is that the language looks similar enough that such people may think they fully understand the semantics even before they've fully internalized all the details. It's a tricky zone when something feels familiar enough that you don't realize the remaining mistakes in your conceptualization.