You can absolutely make a complete, featureful program in Rust without naming a single lifetime, or even without dealing with a single reference/borrow.

But Rust is a dramatically smaller language than C++. The various subsets of C++ people usually carve out tend to be focused on particular styles of programming, like “no exceptions” or “no RTTI”. Notably never things like “signed integer overflow is now defined”, or “std::launder() is now unnecessary”.