Why Rust feels harder at first, on purpose
Rust has a real, well-documented reputation for a steeper learning curve than many other languages, and it's worth being upfront about that rather than glossing over it. The difficulty isn't accidental complexity or bad design, it's a direct consequence of the same strictness that makes Rust valuable for safety-critical code. The compiler refuses to compile code that violates its ownership and borrowing rules, and for developers coming from languages that don't enforce those rules at all, that strictness can initially feel like fighting the compiler over things that would have quietly worked, or quietly failed, in another language.
This shows up most commonly as what the Rust community itself often calls hitting a wall with the borrow checker, spending real time restructuring code not because the logic was wrong, but because the compiler wants proof that the memory-safety rules are satisfied. That friction is real, and it's reasonable for it to slow down early progress noticeably compared to a more permissive language.