You would think they would be smart enough to realize that a language taking X hours to learn is a language flaw not a user flaw, but modern education focuses on specialization talents rather than general intelligence.
Writing good software most often is not easy. The learning curve of a particular language usually is only a modest part of what it takes.
I don't think it's much harder than learning C or C++ which are the only comparable mainstream languages.
I run two intermediate programming courses, one where we teach C++, and another where we teach Rust. In the Rust course, by the first week they are writing code and using 3rd party libraries; whereas in the C course we spend a lot of time dealing with linker errors, include errors, segfaults, etc. The learning curve for C/C++ gets steep very fast. But with Rust it's actually quite flat until you have to get into borrowing, and you can even defer that understanding with clone().
By the end of the semester in the C++ course, students' final project is a file server, they can get there in 14 weeks.
In Rust the final project is a server that implements LSP, which also includes an interpreter for a language they design. The submissions for this project are usually much more robust than the submissions for the C++ course, and I would attribute this difference to the designs of the languages.