They're really not. The moment people hit "**"--pointer-to-pointer--most of them bounce off.
There is a reason why an Operating Systems class is one of the most fearsome things in the CS curriculum--you have pointers everywhere that, once corrupted, are a nightmare to track down due to the lack of support in the language. If I were teaching an OS class, I suspect it's a tossup--Rust might make teaching the class harder than C (not convinced, though ...), but I suspect more students would get an actual working OS at the end of the class.
The worst part is that pointer chasing is a performance anti-pattern nowadays. Everybody wants to make data structures look like FORTRAN common blocks--base declaration+index.
That having been said, I wouldn't teach either C or Rust as a beginning language. A GC language is fine for 95%+ (I'd argue 99%+ actually ...) of programming tasks. And the experience people get will stand the well for the time when they finally need to step outside that--if they're lucky, they never will.