It is a bit dramatic, though less so for some approaches to programming. And of course prototyping is very different from general purpose programming.

With Rust, if you really want the borrow checker to actually never bother you, you really do just have to spam the dynamically-checked wrappers everywhere; when in the groove, having to stop and wrap some existing field (or its holder) and all its usages just to be able to mutate it because you previously didn't think you'd need to is just completely awful if you don't find that "fun".

Whereas in C, if you want to mutate a thing, you can always do so whenever with no concerns (whereas using unsafe to mutate a field of a &Thing in Rust is just UB, though maybe you can get away with using unoptimized builds for a bit) and deal with previous code that may have been written with the assumption it wouldn't change Later™ (but, importantly, still allowing properly testing the modified thing, and perhaps the entire project). Want to change the lifetime of a thing? Just move where you free it, no need to ever change lifetime args across a dozen functions. And in Java the most anything may take is removing a "final" on a field.