I'm used to writing C, and think pointers are easy to understand. I wouldn't call rust 'hard' to learn, but it is without a doubt painful. You also aren't doing manual memory management in rust either... I'd assume the sentiment comes from the irrelevant hoops rust makes you jump through to just compile something simple.

You don't need to be aware of 1000s of foot guns for every block of non rust code. But you do have to remember dozens of pedantic rules, or stdlib wrappers just to trick rust into allowing you to compile your simple/demo code.

> You don't need to be aware of 1000s of foot guns for every block of non rust code. But you do have to remember dozens of pedantic rules

Have you tried using rust-analyzer? I'm usually a bit of an IDE skeptic, but Rust is one of those languages where tight integration with the IDE really helps IMO. It's night and day, I honestly wouldn't want to write Rust without rust-analyzer, but with it it's quite pleasant.