And then someone shows up and hands you a nail gun.
Rust makes me happy because we speak the same language. Stuff gets done and I go home at 4:30 and play with my kids instead of my compiler.
If you can get the hang of it, it’s a safer hammer. You’re still going to be manually managing your memory allocations though. The nailgun people have garbage collection (and yes for the gc folks, I’m aware you can still write allocation free code, or at least take manual control of allocations in a garbage collected language and therefore opt out of garbage collection overhead - but why would you unless there was a performance issue)
I don't manually manage my memory anymore in Rust than I do in garbage collected languages (say Python or Go). (I do have to think about object lifetimes and whats pointing where in all three mentioned languages).
As an aside, I really like not having to manually free locks, close files, release connections back to pools, etc. It's one resource management paradigm that applies to everything - not just memory.
This is the (in my opinion) insurmountable difference between low and high-level languages. Even though rust is (arguably) probably the best/most readable low-level language that as you note can sometime even beat managed languages (locking/file close), it will loose to major refactor-speed.
I'm writing a 10,000 LoC library and I call drop() manually only 3 times, in exactly one place, and not for memory reasons. I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean thinking about lifetimes, sure. If you mean thinking about drop(), almost never.