While I still struggle to think in Rust after years of thinking in C, it is NEVER the borrow checker or lifetimes that trip me, it's the level of abstraction, in that C forced me low level, building my own abstractions, while Rust allows me to think in abstractions first and muse over how to implement those idiomatically.

What did it for me was thinking through how mutable==exclusive, non-mutable==shared, and getting my head around Send and Sync (not quite there yet).

AI helps me with boiler plate, but not with understanding, and if I don't understand I cannot validate what AI produces.

Rust is worth the effort.