Early Rust was really incomprehensible to me, and it's unquestionably better than it once was from an ergonomics and ecosystem perspective. The ~ and @ sigils everywhere were verging on Perl!
a) A lot of code ends up littered with Box anyways, which frankly isn't any more readable since "Box" doesn't tell you anything until you already know what it is and once you do it's just verbosity.
b) As I understand it, Box gets "special treatment" by the compiler/type system, so pretending it's just a pure standard library component is a bit obfuscatory
c) Heap allocation and heap pointers are first class citizens in other languages, why wouldn't they be so in Rust?
There is a strong desire to stop that and have Box be a normal std type, the main thing that is blocking this at the moment is that Box has special deref magic that is not possible to implement with surface level rust syntax (even with nightly features).