I do think Rust would be better for web dev if it had GC, but it doesn't, and no other language comes close to having as good ergonomics otherwise. And the memory management is something you learn once and then it's a bit verbose but no big deal. If you feel like you absolutely have to write custom data structures with circular references for your web server then I tentatively suggest that maybe you're doing web dev wrong.

In my team we onboarded a data scientist used to working in Python who had never used Rust onto a Rust project, and it was just not a big deal. Maybe I'm just fortunate when it comes to colleagues.