I think it's telling that whenever someone raises concerns about any element of Rust, no matter how constructively, they're always met with a wall of "you must not truly get the borrow checker," or "you're using Rust wrong," or "stop trying to write <C/C++/Java/etc> in Rust!", usually with zero evidence that that is in fact what is happening. There's never anything to improve on Rust, it's always user error / a skill issue. If there ever surfaces any audio of Linus Torvalds and Ken Thompson discussing the pros and cons of the borrow checker, I expect a sea of patronising anime avatars to show up, seeking to explain Rust's invention of the concept of ownership to them.
Rust is really nifty, but there are still (many) things that could be improved in Rust, and we'd all benefit from more competition in this space, including Rust! This is not a zero sum game.
Honestly, I also think many people just want a nice ML-like with a good packaging story, and just put up with the borrow checker to get friendly C-like syntax for the Option monad, sum types with exhaustive matching, etc. This is a use case that could very much benefit from a competitor with a more conventional memory model.
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