If someone finds normal ownership concepts in Rust to be difficult, making the leap to async is only going to make that worse.

I don't think it's friendly to Rust beginners but I also think the complaints about if have been overblown

I think it depends on what you're doing... getting to a point where you understand Arc helps a lot, and if you're mostly using it with something like Axum, there's very little you need to worry about specific to lifetime or a lot of the burrowing logic in practice. You can definitely get by with less than perfect code.