Background: I am coming from the JS/TS/Node world, and have decided to jump onto a compiled language. I narrowed down my choices to Go and Rust and eventually decided to go with Rust, because it didn't use GC for memory management.
In fact, since it doesn't have a GC, you can trivially create a memory leak by creating a reference loop... though the ownership checker makes that in itself really difficult, and so it's again less likely to happen than it otherwise would be. At the cost of loops being hard to make even if you want them.
It is possible to do it by using Arc / Rc and cyclical references (which the borrow checker makes infuriatingly difficult -- for good reason!) but you really have to go out of your way for it. And while there are real projects where you need such idioms I have found that you should not try to twist Rust's arm and just opt for something like arena allocator.