If you're programming for ESP, then embassy is the way to go in most cases. You don't need to learn much about lifetimes in most of the application code. Steep learning curve people refer it is "thing blow up at compile time vs runtime." It's easy to write JS or C that passes all tests and compiles and then wonderful blows up when you start using it. It just forces you to learn things you need to know at IMO right now.

My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs.

> My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs.

We're working on that and it should get better soonish. We're working on shared caches, as well as pruning of old cached builds of dependencies that are unlikely to be reused in a future build.