What do you mean by moving information to the type level?
Type definitions are usually further away from the call site than variable declarations. Also, in C, accessing a member of a struct through a pointer requires the -> operator providing yet another clue as to whether you're using a pointer or a value.
In my opinion, this distinction is absolutely key. It should always be obvious at the call site. I don't think there is anything that has caused more bugs in my Swift code than getting this wrong.
Change a type from class to struct or vice versa and chances are your code still compiles when it really shouldn't because it's now completely broken.
If you can’t change a struct’s field, only the whole struct, then I believe it’s fine - and the compiler may decide to copy it or change in-place depending on its available context, is it not the case?
It's not impossible to impose some sort of discipline to mitigate these issues, but why is it a good idea to make values and references indistinguishable at the call site? I don't get it.
But it's not surprising. I don't get a lot of decisions that language designers have been making. The entire drive towards more and more syntactical abstraction in order to make everything look like a DSL is a mistake in my opinion.