I've heard lots of people complain during the "exploratory" phase of writing code - maybe you haven't fully figured out how to write the code yet, you're iteratively making changes and restructuring as you go. Most languages make this easy, but with Rust e.g. if you add a lifetime to a reference in a struct it usually becomes a major refactor which can be frustrating to deal with when you're not even sure yet if your approach will work. More experienced devs would probably just use Rc or similar in that case to avoid the lifetime, and then maybe go back and refactor later once the code is "solidified", but for newer devs - they add the &, see the compiler error telling them it's missing a lifetime annotation, spend 30min refactoring, and that's how these stereotypes get reinforced