I actually think removing ~ was a mistake.

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?