It bothers me too, maybe for different reasons, as an experienced rustacean. Code like this is a world of pain (in any language, might I add, even though Rust is the only one that shows you why with the syntax).

Internally shared ownership is a huge anti-pattern and rarely achieves what you’re actually trying to do. Graphs like these are much better represented by splitting the topology from the node data, and using indices or keys to form edges instead of (smart) pointers.

You can use pointers, but then the correct choice is actually raw pointers and `unsafe`, with a safe whole-graph-level API for traversal and access. This is what Rust’s own collection types do internally.