> have to understand everything, because if you don't do it in the "Rust way", it often won't compile

I confess I haven't dug into it much yet, but this reminds me of how Haskell was. By the time you got a program to compile your project was more or less done.

In some senses I actually find Rust a bit harder than Haskell. With Haskell the types are immutable and as such they can be happily shared everywhere. That required basically no rewiring in my brain.

With Rust, I had to get used to single ownership or explicit cloning. There's an argument that this is "better", but I found it a bit harder to learn.

Rust is similar. I don't have a link handy, but I've read a few articles noting experience with programming in rust where a program that compiles works. Provided the logic is correct, of course.