Starting with knowledge of another statically typed language, Rust really isn't that hard. Borrow checker gymnastics take a few days to get over after which one can get relatively productive. There's plenty of code samples on GitHub and mature crates to get going on the db and web layers.
As a primarily Python programmer, I did not feel over-burdened by learning Rust. Sure, I never learned how to deal with lifetimes, never wrote a macro, and probably used clone a few places where I did not have the need. I was almost certainly leaving performance on the table. Yet the language gives you so many guardrails that I always felt like my code was doing the correct thing.
