RAII really is a brilliant design, it both (mostly) solves the problem of manual memory management and is easier (for my brain at least) to reason about than deterministic (shared_ptr, Obj-C/Swift) or nondeterministic (managed langs) garbage collection schemes. Once I grokked it I've never looked at managed langs the same way again.

In C++'s defense it's not like the language or the compilers encourage you to use shared_ptr, but it's also true (mainly for legacy C-interop cruft) it doesn't do enough to nudge you to write code in a proper RAII style, nor to enforce correctness WRT ownership.

I like that Rust forces you to explicitly opt out of RAII and/or single-owner semantics. (Those are the "defaults" in C++ too, but too easy to implicitly or accidentally opt out of). On the other hand you can write Java in any language, and from the little Rust I've read, newcomers from managed langs will often daisy-chain enough smart pointers in a row to put any 13-year-old who just downloaded Unreal Engine to shame.

The last time I took a serious look at Rust I thought it took things too far in the other direction; you weren't able to use two (nonoverlapping!) data members of the same struct in a function, and the suggested workaround was to wrap it in a smart pointer. Has that issue been fixed now?