Also, fascinating that Rust’s borrow checker sort of encourages you over time to adopt an entity component system architecture instead of a naive OO architecture.
Is this true outside of gamedev contexts?
The idea of operating on individual components of an entity is very compelling in those cases, it's not even novel. We often have done this by pulling data out of datastores in parallel array like requests. The difference with this model is that it creates an elegant interface over the data for an entity that isn't a bastardized version of OO, instead just the data and structures you need present in the context in which your working.
As a non-gamedev, I found this really compelling.