That was my concern that I had when I started learning the language. I think it is true, but I was surprised how quickly I managed to get used to the Rust way.
Of course, that's just "often," not nearly "always." There are many valid programs that the borrow checker struggles with, and in those cases, the "Rust way" is just needlessly convoluted. There are many problems for which the most common answer is "just store all this data in a list and use list indices like pointers." (Thankfully there has been a lot of progress on a new borrow checker that's less easily startled.)
I mean I've improved but I still have a lot of "wtf" moments. End up doing a lot of deep copying and heap allocations just to shut the compiler up, which makes me question just how "zero cost" the safety is.