Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the impression that the people who learn Rust, tend to be quite experienced programmers. I have yet to see complete beginners document their journey, starting with Rust.
I've seen lots of people do that with C/C++, Java, and the other usual suspects - but Rust still seems like a language for at least intermediate programmers.
However, you don't need to be an expert to learn Rust. It even helps if you don't have too many expectations about OOP and pointers, because their Rust equivalents have different design patterns/idioms, and you may need to unlearn some things.
That's largely a special case of the general difference between owned and referenced data, which applies to all non-trivial data types. "String" just happens to be the first of those that most novice coders will encounter. If anything, it makes a nice "toy" case for the general distinction.