This is an old myth thats no longer fully true. Rust is a language that straddles both high level and low level in the sense that it is literally indistinguishable. You can use rust as if it were a high level language without knowing anything about low level stuff. The binary you get at the end, ends up being low level in the sense that it's performant as if it was written in a low level language.

There is definitely a mental overhead with rust but this has nothing to do with low level or high level concepts. The borrow checker is actually a high level feature that exists for safety, not performance.