Stop making me memorize the borrow checker

Sure. But pick based on concrete knowledge of the tool rather than broad and abstract categories. Tools are routinely discovered to be more broadly applicable than their initially intended use case, or even to be poor fit for that use case. The map is not the terrain.

And in any case, ecosystem usually trumps other concerns. Deep learning is a task you'd think a system language would be ideal for. Yet Python is a probably a better choice than Rust. The best reason to avoid Rust for a new project is probably that the market for Rust developers is insufficiently liquid (though presumably that won't be true for much longer, if it's still true at all).