> Languages should be small, not large.

Yes. At the very least, features should carry a lot of weight and be orthogonal to other features. When I was young I used to pride myself on knowing all the ins and outs of modern C++, but over time I realized that needing to be a “language lawyer” was a design shortcoming.

All that being said I’ve never seen the functionality of Rust’s borrow checker reduced to a simpler set of orthogonal features and it’s not clear that’s even possible.