It's still valuable to have a language that has better semantics and a more modern standard library than C++, even if it didn't get the benefits of strict memory management. That's still a Useful Thing.
Once you introduce a garbage collector there are plenty of other languages that provide that while still having expressive type systems and modern features, like Kotlin or C#.
Rusts ownership system has benefits beyond memory management.
If I'm a situation where having a GC is ok and there is no "major library ecosystem benefit" (or simlilar) for one of the languages I still would choose rust over Python, JS, TS, Java, Kotlin, Dart, Scala (probably C#, idk. as I haven't used it).
The borrow checker is something which cost you once time to learn but if you are fairly familiar with it it normally won't cost you much time (if any). Sure there are still situations in which it can be tricky. But most times they are pretty clear and you can just throw a Clone/Rc/Arc at it and it's normally just fine (the borrow checker is still useful even with managed pointers/collections like Rc/Arc, in a certain way it makes them less error-prone to use, especially in case of more complex types like some thread safe Cow optimized manage pointer type you might find in a library).
